Portland Museum of Art
Elizabeth Colomba: Mythologies
Elizabeth Colomba uses classical techniques and themes to reimagine Greek myths, historical narratives, and autobiographical details with a contemporary lens. The exhibition includes oil paintings, works on paper, and Colomba’s first video work, Cendrillon, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. The film, an adaptation of the fable Cinderella, exemplifies Colomba’s aesthetic exploration of extravagance and femininity.
Princeton University Art Museum
Elizabeth Colomba: Repainting the Story
A strong commitment to the figurative tradition defines Elizabeth Colomba’s provocative narratives. In her first solo museum exhibition, the colonial-era interiors of Bainbridge House provide an eloquent foil for the artist’s paintings, which foreground historical and fictional Black women, often richly dressed and placed in the opulent spaces from which they have been erased or in which they were assigned subservient roles.
The New Yorker
Elizabeth Colomba's "157 Years of Juneteenth"
By Françoise Mouly, Cover by Elizabeth Colomba
The artist discusses Harlem and the necessity of painting Black bodies into historically white spaces.
Vogue
Painter Elizabeth Colomba Is Giving Art’s Hidden Figures Their Close-Up
By Dodie Kazanjian
Colomba’s painting could have been done in the 1860s. She’s a new kind of history painter, an attractive, shy, yet highly ambitious artist in her 40s, telling stories about black women—usually real but sometimes imagined—who lived in earlier eras. Her career to date has been largely under the radar, but, like Manet’s Laure, she’s on the verge of being discovered.
Elizabeth Colomba was born in Épinay-sur-Seine, France, to parents of Martinican descent. She attended the Estienne School of Art and the École national supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Colomba’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME), and the Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ). Her work frequently features in group presentations both stateside and abroad, including recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) (San Francisco, CA), among others. Her work has been featured on the cover of The New Yorker (2022), and in Vogue (2023). Her work is held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY); the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art (Philadelphia, PA), the Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, NJ), and the Park Avenue Armory (New York, NY), among others. Elizabeth Colomba lives and works in New York.
