ABSTRACT
Big Bo is a large work—a shaped canvas of a black musician's face. The only other work by Rosenquist to address African Americans directly is his earlier Painting for the American Negro, a large triptych filled with images of American products and black and white subjects. Exacerbating the racial issues of Rosenquist's painting is his choice of palette: Big Bo is a black man who has been painted in pink tones. Until the 1950s, pink was generally considered a masculine color because of its association with red. Pink hides Big Bo in plain sight, calling attention to his anonymity, yet in its chromatic washes rendering him somewhat unreadable. Warhol, too, painted race in pink tones in his Race Riot of 1963. Big Bo, with its pink portrait of a musician and its perspective on issues of race and consumerism, shifts the directionality of consumption away from the dynamics of Painting for the American Negro.
