Elizabeth Colomba: More than a Muse
Feb 20, 2027 - Jul 3, 2027
Free with admission
Location: Gallery 9
More than a Muse draws together a selection of works by Elizabeth Colomba that reflect on female figures portrayed throughout masterpieces of Western Art. Each hinge on a central query: who are these women?
Too often unnamed and subordinated to the legacies of the predominantly male artists they inspired, these women were not merely muses; they were persons in their own right, with their own stories. Through her paintings and their studies on paper, Colomba returns agency and complexity to figures oft used only as symbols. With these portraits, she examines lives that were, in her words, “rich, complicated, and full beyond what the canvas could contain.” Colomba does not try to complete their stories, but rather, to open them.
Jeanne Duval, Margaret Garner, Olga Brown, Fanny Eaton. Colomba draws out the lives of these and other women in her works as an invitation to consider, to question, to admire, and to learn. While we know intimate details about the mainly male painters and writers across the artistic canon—the names of Édouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, or Edgar Degas have hardly been overlooked—the biographies, lives, and achievements of the women who inspired them remain largely unknown and under-researched. More than a Muse emerges, then, as an act of restoration through the language of portraiture.
Elizabeth Colomba was born in France and raised in Épinay-sur-Seine to parents of Martinican descent and now lives and works in New York. Trained at the Estienne School of Art and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Colomba draws on Old Master techniques and compositional strategies while reclaiming as subjects rather than symbols the histories, myths, and allegories that have long excluded Black women. Through meticulously rendered paintings, she challenges entrenched hierarchies of beauty and significance, repositioning women of color at the center of art history’s visual and cultural narratives.
