Drawing on the genre of the ancient Greek myth of Zeus’ three daughters, or “graces,” Colescott renders a nude, blonde, blue-eyed Venus that seems to tower over three smaller, dark-skinned bathers in the same pool. Colescott casts his Black graces as preoccupied with Venus. His painting stages a contemporary conversation about colorism and white supremacy through satire. Taking a humorous but incisive view on history and culture, Colescott zeroes in on whiteness as a standard of beauty, and its ripple effects on the politics of representation. “Art is, in one sense, expressive of standards by which a society judges beauty, personal beauty. Black people being judged and judging themselves by a white standard based on classical Greek tradition is one of the contemporary issues I’m getting at.”—Robert Colescott, 1988