Elizabeth Colomba

Colomba’s work serves as a critical intervention into the Western art historical canon. Employing the aesthetic conventions of Old Master painting, she centers Black women in her compositions, portraying them with dignity and self-possession. Influenced by Renaissance and Baroque traditions, her meticulous technique supports a fearless revisionism that insists on Black representation across historical and symbolic registers. “Beauty is democratic—it shouldn’t be a privilege to enjoy beauty,” Colomba has said.

The exhibition at Venus Over Manhattan builds on Colomba’s recent museum presentations—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—and spans multiple thematic groupings. The presentation includes paintings from the artist’s History series, honoring Black women who profoundly shaped American social and political life; single portraits from her Mythology and Allegory series, reimagining goddesses, heroines, and archetypes; and new works from her Orientalism series, a pointed interrogation of nineteenth-century academic painting.

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Hardcover, Venus Over Manhattan, 2025
108 p, 10.75 × 8.375 in.