Elizabeth Colomba
Elizabeth Colomba (born 1976) is a French painter of Martinique heritage known for her paintings of black people in historic settings. Her work has been shown at the Gracie Mansion, the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, the Musée d'Orsay, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early life. Colomba was born in Èpinay-sur-Seine, where her parents had immigrated to from Martinique. As a child, she told her mother she wanted to become a painter after learning about Picasso. She began painting early, making  watercolors as a child to decorate her parents' Caribbean restaurant. As a teenager, she read "The Image of the Black in Western Art" by John and Dominique de Menil, which inspired her to paint a portrait of her great-grandmother in the style of "Whistler’s Mother". She continued study the paintings of Louvre, especially the Dutch masters, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1998, she moved to Los Angeles and worked in storyboarding and illustration for the film industry. Career. Colomba started spending time in New York in 2007 to further her painting career, and moved to  the city permanently in 2011. She met artist Deborah Willis in 2010 after Willis saw one of her paintings at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and Willis helped her enter the New York art world. Her work focuses on black figures from history, especially black women. Her subjects have included Biddy Mason, Laure, and Chevalier de Saint-Georges. In 2016, she had a solo exhibition of works at the Long Gallery in Harlem, which The New Yorker described as "opulent portraits of black women [that] redress the erasures of women of color in nineteenth-century art history." In  March 2022, her first solo museum show opened at Princeton University.