Colette is one of New York City's artistic Living National Treasures. Her pioneering street performances in the 1970s brought the avant-garde art form into the public eye. Her beautiful installations at such location as the Fiorucci store on 59th Street in Manhattan, at The Clocktower and PS i, and in various European venues such as Berlin and Rome brought crucial attention to this vital genre of work. And they had a huge influence on Pop culture (without Colette we would not have had many aspects of Madonna, for example). Her altered photographs have been widely exhibited and published to critical acclaim.

The influence of her "Living Tableaux" resonates in the works of artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman (who restricts her fantasy personas to the two-dimensionality of her photographs) and Matthew Barney (whose use of mythology, notably his satyr impersonations, takes costume play to similar levels
of flamboyance). The elaborately staged performances of the Japanese artist, Mariko Mori, also seem to channel Colette in their appropriations of cultural and mythological icons.

Colette's essentially blithe esthetic has celebrated aspects of the feminine during the rise of an era when academic feminism declared suspect everything conventionally associated with enjoying being a girl. That includes high heels, fashion and make-up, not to mention good manners, elegance and romance. Her pieces also have hypothesized an ambivalent relationship with domesticity and fashion, posing questions about the nature of female roles in art and life without ever rejecting femininity. Through the manipulation and dramatization of her female archetypes Colette constantly alters stereotypes into something fresh, provocative and glamorous.

Her characters are allegorical. They invoke a highly theatrical symbolism to investigate social history and to challenge gender cliches. Her work constantly mines her own personal history and her associations with art and art history. During the past three decades Colette has enacted many recreations of legendary women, among them Delacroix's figure of liberty, Marianne; Mata Hari (in 1984 the artist turned her Berlin apartment into the boudoir of the alluring spy); and the Countess Reichenbach (1986), a fictitious aristocrat from the era of the extravagant King Ludwig.