Les Demoiselles d’Alabama is the truthful retelling of what an Americanized version of the Spanish painter’s masterpiece would look like.

Despite its garish colors and penchant for satire, Robert Colescott’s work is more than just a parody – way different from the light-hearted, joking critiques of Marcel Duchamp’s urinals and Mona Lisa spinoffs. Colescott’s dark sense of humor reimagines Western art history from a black man’s perspective. You know, since the dominant narratives pretended that people of color pretty much didn’t exist for thousands of years.

With frenetic energy and inspiration, Colescott looked backward in an effort to help American culture move forward. In just ten years, from 1975 to 1985, he painted a series of artistic appropriations. Colescott focused on reinventing the genre of history painting, which had been solidified by titans like Jacques-Louis David and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The painting in question here is an obvious parody of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Other works from this series of reimaginations include Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa and even Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Despite the lasting fame of these artworks, Colescott has lamented that viewers often associate his work with just this series. So do your due diligence and look up some of his other work.

The importance of this series has not gone unnoticed. This piece made it to the Seattle Art Museum’s permanent collection because of an art acquisition fund set up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of their philanthropic endeavors, Bill and Melinda Gates gave back to the Seattle art community in a major way. In 1999, they promised $10 million to the Seattle Art Museum, with a particular focus on collecting. Like any other extremely wealthy person, Bill Gates is no stranger to good art. He owns a codex, or set of scientific writings, by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Based on this purchase alone, we know he probably could have given more than just $10 million to the Seattle Art Museum. The codex itself cost over $30 million when he bought it at a Christie’s auction in 1994.