Lewis and Clark: Jefferson and Sacagawea Mourn the Death of Meriwether Lewis (in a New Orleans Dance Hall), 2009
Charcoal, ink, and water media paint on paper
Warrington Colescott’s Lewis and Clark: Jefferson and Sacagawea Mourn the Death of Meriwether Lewis (in a New Orleans Dance Hall) depicts the scene of explorer Meriwether Lewis’s suicide. Although Lewis supposedly killed himself in the privacy of a hotel room, Colescott imagines the tragic event happening amidst the hustle and bustle of a New Orleans dance hall. Sacagawea, Lewis’s traveling companion, cries in the upper right hand corner while Thomas Jefferson, wearing a blue dress coat with black trim, hangs his head in despair. At the center of the image, a rough-hewn Lewis raises a pistol to his mouth. Behind him, in the busy saloon, a woman in a white dress raises her right hand while a couple embraces intimately. The skewed two-point perspective of the interior scene lends itself to the chaos and drama of the image.
Warrington Colescott is known for his social satire in the tradition of William Hogarth and George Grosz. This work and others in the series continue his exploration of history. But the story is more complex: Colescott was born and raised in California to Creole Louisiana parents (his own term). Since 1994, he has been weaving his personal insight into this work. Messing with history and letting the drama unfold as he wants it to, Colescott has created an engaging and magnetic narrative of the settlement of the western American frontier. To play with fact and fiction draws attention to the importance images can play in our mental recreations of the past.
