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July 27, 2026 at 4:54 AM
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"Armelle" by Elizabeth Colomba (French) - Oil on canvas / 1997 - Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #ElizabethColomba #Colomba #TheMet #BlackArt #BlackArtist #art #artText #BlueskyArt #PortraitofaWoman #WomenPaintingWomen #MetropolitanMuseumofArt
American artist Elizabeth Colomba painted her cousin Armelle while thinking with (and against) the language of canonical portraiture. The pose and polish nod toward John Singer Sargent’s "Madame X," but the remake shifts what is centered. It's not spectacle, not rumor, but presence and Black womanhood held with dignity and specificity. Armelle stands in an elegant interior, her body angled slightly while her face turns in profile. Her eyes look up and to our right, toward a framed painting on the wall. Her skin is a beautiful warm brown tone under soft, controlled light. Her black hair is gathered into a neat bun, and small earrings catch a faint highlight. She wears a crisp black-and-white ensemble with a white, button-front top with a deep black collar and black trim at the sleeves, paired with a long black skirt that falls in a smooth, heavy drape over a white underskirt hem. One hand rests lightly on a small wooden table, fingertips relaxed. The other hand holds a single pale pink flower on a long stem, hanging downward like a quiet punctuation mark. The floor beneath her is a bold black-and-white checkerboard, sharpening the geometry of the room. In the upper right, the framed picture shows an outdoor scene with a standing figure beneath palms. It's an image that pulls her attention and organizes the whole moment around looking. Armelle’s sideways glance toward the “painting-within-the-painting” (a 1885 watercolor painted in the Bahamas by Winslow Homer called "Under the Palm Tree" at the National Gallery of Art) creates a triangle of looking: we look at her, she looks toward art history, and art history looks back ... all reframed through family, roots, and choice. Colomba has described beginning from an existing story and remaking it to feel true to her mixed French and Caribbean inheritance. Here, that remaking reads as both critique and care, claiming the museum’s visual grammar as a space where Black beauty is not an exception but a standard.
February 18, 2026 at 5:42 PM
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“Daphne” by Elizabeth Colomba (French) - Oil and gold leaf on canvas / 2015 - Studio Museum in Harlem (New York) #WomenInArt #art #WomanArtist #ElizabethColomba #artwork #Colomba #WomensArt #WomenArtists #StudioMuseum #daphne #mythology #femaleartist #WomenPaintingWomen #BlueskyArt #bskyart #beauty
In her series “Mythology,” French artist Elizabeth Colomba looks to Greek mythology for inspiration. Here, she references the tale of the naiad (a freshwater nymph) Daphne and the gods Cupid and Apollo. Colomba reshapes the myth by positioning a Black woman as the primary subject of the painting, thereby countering the erasure of Black bodies from Classical antiquity narratives. In Daphne, Colomba represents the naiad holding an arrow, Apollo's lyre as the pedestal of the table behind her, and, further in the background, the branches of a laurel tree, into which Daphne is transformed during the climax of her story. Colomba’s striking figurative paintings weave Black women into highly detailed compositions through historical European imagery with a fresh, imaginative twist— these Black women are not models or servants painted by white artists. Colomba controls their narratives in a compassionately humanizing approach, giving them a meaningful, full-bodied purpose, an engagement beyond beautiful, exotic prop. “Daphne” showcases a Black woman, the central figure, standing in a richly decorated room. She is dressed in a sumptuous, long gown. The bodice is a dark olive-green with a complex brocade pattern and is cinched at the waist with a silver ribbon that forms a bow in the front. The long skirt is a deep, reddish-maroon, appearing to be made of a heavy, luxurious fabric that drapes elegantly around her. She wears large, circular earrings contrasting against her dark skin. Her onyx hair is styled neatly into a bun. Daphne’s expression is serious and thoughtful, her gaze directed towards the background while she delicately holds the arrow at her chest. The overall atmosphere is one of refinement that evokes a sense of timeless elegance that strengthens themes of dignity, resilience, and the complexities of historical representation.
July 27, 2025 at 10:40 PM
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“Phillis” by Elizabeth Colomba (French) - Oil on canvas / 2010 - Princeton University Art Museum (New Jersey) #WomenInArt #art #artText #artwork #Princeton #arte #PhillisWheatley #ElizabethColomba #Colomba #BlackArt #ContemporaryArt #ArtHistory #CatArt #ArtBsky #WomensArt #WomenArtists #WomanArtist
A Black woman with dark coffee skin sits on the edge of a narrow iron bed in a modest room, her long red dress pooling in precise folds that catch the muted light. Her features are calm and intent, framed by a brown headwrap. She looks slightly away, thoughtful rather than posed. Around her rest books, loose pages, and writing tools that signal active authorship. Two cats animate the space: a black-and-white one settled closely in her lap and a tabby cat engaged with a fallen quill at the bedside so their small bodies echo her focus and energy. Bare walls, a simple window, and the unadorned bed frame underscore the contrast between the richness of her intellect and the spareness of her surroundings, keeping our attention on her presence, her hands, and the materials of her work. Elizabeth Colomba, a French painter born in Épinay-sur-Seine to parents from Martinique, recasts the first published African American woman poet, Phillis Wheatley, as an autonomous intellectual rather than an enslaved curiosity filtered through white approval. Rather than recreating her Boston household literally, the artist composes an allegorical interior where red cloth, stacked books, and scattered pages affirm Wheatley’s authority over language and learning despite enslavement, surveillance, and precarious freedom. The two cats, playful yet watchful, have been read as stand-ins for her short-lived children and as witnesses to a life spent negotiating tenderness, faith, and racial violence; their engagement with the quill folds biography into symbol. Trained in the French academic tradition and drawing on Old Master composition, Colomba reclaims the pictorial codes that once excluded Black women, inserting Wheatley at the center of art history as a rigorous intellectual, not a decorative exception.
November 7, 2025 at 5:16 AM
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Winter by Elizabeth Colomba (French) - Oil on canvas from the Four Seasons series (2012–2018) - Portland Museum of Art (Maine) #womeninart #womanartist #elizabethcolomba #winter #portlandmuseumofart #fineart #oilpainting #fourseasons #art #portrait #womensart #artwork #poc #frenchartist #artoftheday
The final painting in Colombia’s four-part, life-size series called Winter represents the mature stage of womanhood: the wealth of wisdom cultivated through time. Choosing a quiet and rich palette of brown and green, the portrait breaks with classic stereotypes to focus not on the external climate, but rather, the warmth and security it heeds. Most notably, Winter is a portrait of Colomba’s mother. With a Caribbean headdress and positioned beside a painting by Winslow Homer titled, A Garden in Nassau, the figure is surrounded by references to her Caribbean origins. She wears a dress inspired by one from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and while her fur stole alludes to the cold climate of the season it draws focus instead to warmth. The figure holds a book in her hand, recalling a bedtime story one is read by the fire, as well as the parallel gesture of sharing stories collected from experience and passing on wisdom to the next generation. Closing the series with wisdom, the Winter portrait nevertheless includes a shadow to the nature of time, with the cane serving as an indication of the body’s wear, the cane is equally an elegant supportive device, its top gilded and enhancing the regal poise of the figure. A crab lies beneath the figure’s cane, which she nonchalantly pierces as she stands tall, her gaze lifted. A symbol of both resilience and a journey, the crab is also a direct reference to cancer, a disease which Colomba’s mother battled three times. Victorious in the first two, she sadly succumbed to the third during the painting’s completion. With a bouquet of lilies on the mantle attributed simultaneously to motherhood, as with Hera and the Virgin Mary, rebirth, and mourning, Winter is also a personal homage to Colomba’s mother.
January 16, 2025 at 8:19 AM