Spotlighting The Others: Lucy Liu and Elizabeth Colomba in Conversation

Elizabeth Colomba is on a mission to bring the portraits of black women into historically male, white dominated cultural spaces. Amidst her latest solo show at Venus Over Manhattan, the gallery hosted a conversation between Colomba and her friend and fellow artist, the acclaimed actress Lucy Liu, who, through her acting, has brought Asian representation to the silver screen.

Representation and misrepresentation are fraught—Colomba’s paintings and drawings reimagine Black women in richly detailed historical aristocratic milieus in an Old Master style. When she was eighteen, on a school trip to the Louvre, Elizabeth Colomba stopped in her tracks, stunned. None of her classmates stopped. “I was the only one noticing.” She was talking about Portrait of Madeleine, “formerly Negresse,” she said. “Full stop,” a woman called disparingly from the audience, quickly following up with: “Sorry. I just had to.” Several audience members nodded in understanding. As a young French-Martiniquais, Colomba was elated to see the depiction of a black woman for the first time in a museum, even if she was both exoticized and sexualized, one breast exposed. “That moment grabbed you,” actress Lucy Liu observed.“Yes, I wanted to bring other [black] women to the walls of museums,” Colomba replied. With work on view in the permanent collection at The Metropolitan Museum, The Park Avenue Armory, and a video commission for The Metropolitan Opera under her belt, New York institutions are embracing her mission.

“It is difficult to fit a whole life into a painting, but I do,” Colomba explains. Her first solo show, a retrospective of sorts, at Venus Over Manhattan, brings together older and newer series—Orientalism, History, Allegory, and Tarot—of oil paintings and their studies. Several were on view in her most recent museum exhibitions, Elizabeth Colomba: Mythologies at the Portland Museum of Art in 2023 and Elizabeth Colomba: Repainting the Story at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2022. Unifying her work, that which depicts black women represented in honorific settings. Orientalism revisits the 19th-century style in which artists painted non-Western motifs, often stereotypes, which the audience perceived as documentary. Colomba’s versions have black female leads and incorporate Caribbean symbolism, subverting the colonial authorial voice. While History includes portraits of the first Black millionaress, the activist and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814-1904), Anna Albertine Olga Brown, Miss Lala (1858-1945) a famous European entertainer, known for her act the iron-jaw, and the African-American a capella group the Fisk Jubileee singers that brought their spiritual music to mainstream audiences. Each painting is deeply researched. For dress and details, she uses museum databases like The Met’s and the Frick Museum’s seeing herself as an anthropologist, “digging for stories,” as she renders new motifs in familiar styles.

The conversation, held in the gallery, between two friends, two artists, and two ‘others,’ was unexpected. Liu is, after all is a celebrated actress, having had roles in Charlie’s Angels, Ally McBeal, Kill Bill, and Elementary among others. The room was electric with curiosity about how the actress would lend herself to this art setting. Both women have come up and extended representation for their races in their respective industries, often, with an acute understanding of their role as tokens, or to meet a diversity quota. Both from immigrant families, Liu grew up in New York City with Chinese parents, and Colomba in Paris with Martiniquais parents, have navigated cultural settings where they were not represented. Colomba soon realized that France would have no opportunities for a female artist of color, so she jumped at the opportunity to move to Los Angeles (where she met Liu). In France, assimilation to French culture dominated, whereas in the United States, conversations about, in Liu’s words, ”race, slavery, and ‘the other’,” and the positive representation of other cultures, had come further.

At one point, off-handedly, Liu said: “They see us as a pie. How much of a pie can we color in?” Alluding to instrumentalizing in their existence in these spaces. When Liu lauded Colomba for being the only black artist who has been commissioned to paint a portrait for The Park Avenue Armory, her response was “They closed the door behind me,” as no person of color has been asked since. However, Minerva hangs in the main hall of the Armory, offering black women a seat at the table. “Art is essence, it is not a concrete answer. Otherwise, it would be a nine-to-five job,” Liu succinctly commented on art moving the needle.

On the topic of artistic process, determining motifs and reworking, Colomba shares that in her The Four Seasons series, another painting is hidden beneath Winter. At first, she depicted the figure sitting, rather shriveled, but decided that she did not want to depict winter as the end. Instead, she reworked the portrait using her mother as a sitter, holding a cane, and if you look closely, she is crushing a crab—her cancer. Centering the winter of life as a space of regality, wisdom, and power. Engrossed in her process and a need for perfection, Colomba adds, “Silk and velvet are difficult. Sometimes, I don’t change because I want to; the painting makes me.”

Motifs from Tarot cards stem from Martiniquais culture, where a visit to the voodoo man in the village to understand your future or the destiny of your children is as common as tying your shoes—even if you, like Colomba, happen to be a catholic. It reassures, Colomba explains. She can absorb superstition from any culture in her everyday life, but can as easily discard it. Black cats mean nothing to her, for instance. To help guide viewers in deciphering Caribbean, spiritual, art historical, and cultural symbolism, she likes explaining her work, which is dense with detail: “if you are interested, I will tell you the story,” she says generously.

Colomba is looking forward to the Costume Institute’s newest theme, the Black Dandy, and its exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Met, hoping it will not only be “fashion and hype, but respectfully approached.” Opening to the public on May 10, after the institute’s major fundraiser, The Met Gala, it has, as Jeremy O’Harris shares in his op-ed for Vogue, already become a catalyst for more mainstream understanding of the impact of dandyism on popular culture. Liu and Colomba’s conversation also reflects that change does not happen through a one-off; “We need to normalize these things,” Liu explained.

Crisscrossing between mediums (painting, silkscreening, and embroidery, which she can bring to sets) and acting, Liu shared that the contrast from working within the comfort of a large team during a shot can leave her feeling lonely in the studio. While Colomba, whose work is painstakingly slow, compares the process to torture—sometimes imagining her grandmother in Martinique who had to work on a sugar field—yet, she has to push herself to say yes to unexpected shorter duration projects and leave the studio to see friends. Her first reaction to when the New Yorker asked her to create a cover for them to commemorate Juneteenth’s 157^th anniversary in 2022 was ‘no.’ Her editor for the graphic novel Queenie: Godmother of Harlem, with whom she was working with at the time, talked her into it. On view in the show is the New Yorker drawing. Colomba is quick to add that we do not need to carry generational trauma, and that breaking the cycle is important. However, both women investigate emotional traces and their relationship to the body; in her series 41, Liu embroidered spines onto paper, reflecting how life experience can be felt in the body.

In 2019, Liu exhibited in a duo-show at the National Museum of Singapore, and from what I’ve seen online, it is good. (Unlike Adrien Brody or James Franco, whose work is half-cooked, at best). I heard Adam Lindemann, VOM’s founder, offered to visit Liu’s studio, so perhaps she will collaborate more with the gallery. Lindemann’s programming is not foreign to showing artists who first broke through in other media. In 2017, he exhibited photographs supported by an exhibition design depicting a crumbling Europe by French novelist Michel Houellebecq in a show aptly titled French Bashing. I loved seeing this physical extension of the provocative worlds that he creates in his literary works.

When Liu asked Colomba if she had a goal for the next three to four years, she simply replied, with her French mannerism, deadpan but matter-of-factly, as if there was no other way forward: “I have no answer. I just keep on painting.” Colomba’s path to insert black women into historically white and male-dominated spaces is set. She is erasing their distinction as ‘the other,’ doing the important work of shifting perspectives, one painting at a time.

Elizabeth Colomba is currently on view at Venus Over Manhattan at 39 Great Jones Street, 10012, NY, NY. 

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