Robert Colescott. The Dutiful Son

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Robert Colescott’s painterly depictions of women overlaid with racial nuances provide some of his most brash imagery. Though many carry sexual undertones, curator Lowery Stokes Sims argued that the disturbing edge of these works in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement is more suggestive of male fears than a voyeuristic male gaze.¹ Colescott satirized the idealized white suburban life in The Dutiful Son (1979), in which a lumpy mother lounges, smoking and reading on the couch, while her son, wearing a ruffled apron, vacuums the rug. Colescott’s depiction of a white middle-class family freed from the entrapment of gender roles makes for an uncomfortable domestic dynamic, perhaps anticipating the consequent white male fear of being demoted to an inferior social position.