I am excited to write that Transart Institute at Liverpool John Moores University accepted my application to begin a practice based PhD.
This fall I will begin studies in New York City and remotely. To complete it, I will do relevant readings, research, write, paint, construct installations with visual and sound elements; participate in peer critiques, a peer research group, and online advisory committee meetings; write a forty thousand word thesis; arrange and mount a 2024 final solo thesis exhibition; attend monthly 2 day intensives and three annual in-person residencies (in NYC during October 2021, October 2022, and October 2023, in Berlin during July 2022, July 2023, and July 2024, and in Liverpool during July 2022, July 2023, and July 2024); and maintain this creative research journal.
Here I will post images of my studio work in process (paintings and installations), exhibition announcements, supervisory committee meeting notes, and scholarly research notes starting with a look into my:
PROPOSED RESEARCH TOPIC OVERVIEW:
Towards a more inclusive 21st Century color theory, I propose to create new bodies of work (both written and visual, i.e., paintings/installations w/visuals and sound elements) based on my research of published historical color theories. I will explore blind spots in the history of color theories and add to what I imagine becomes an intersectional 21st century color theory.
I aim to participate in updating color theory so that it is more ecologically sound, formally astute, iconographically or symbolically described, feminist-based and/or gender inclusive, global or culturally sensitive, socio-economically savvy, biographically and autobiographically aware, linguistically and deconstructively open, and psychoanalytically considered.
Throughout the course of my research and writing I will examine color in advertising, color in art and the art of color mixing, color in art history, color and culture, color in design (textile, digital, fashion, and industrial design), color and gender, color and psychology, color and race, color and sexuality.
WORKING TITLE:
ChromaTheory- On Abstract Painting, Color and Otherness
BACKGROUND:
The contextual and literary review of my work includes the history of color theories, color psychology, and how artists and art writers use color to discuss its relationship to culture, gender, race and other identity markers. For example, artists such as Tomashi Jackson, whose work deals with the connection between the linguistics of color theory and racialized America focus on color are relevant. In her Hyperallergic article “The Linguistic Overlap of Color Theory and Racism”, dated December 14, 2016, Risa Puleo writes on how Tomashi Jackson found her studies of Josef Albers’ color language was used to describe color perception, which mirrored the language of racialized segregation. That inspired Jackson to use color perception as an aesthetic strategy for investigating the history of America’s mid-late twentieth century school desegregation and ultimately to the contemporary re-segregation of public space. She creates large-scale abstract mixed media works that connect past, present, formalism, intuition, color theory, and human rights legislation.” hyperallergic.com/345021/the-linguistic…
And works by Becca Albee, who in her aperture “Full Color Feminism” interview with Annika Klein regarding Albee’s photographs and installation art says of her Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence series that she researched different lifestyle-oriented and types of color-related therapies are also pertinent. Albee considers gender constructs surrounding the marketing of color and its relationship to capitalism. She says she found a style of color therapy called Aura-Soma that requires clients to go to a specialist who presents them with lots of bottles filled with different color liquids on a lighted grid. From them, the client picks the three or four bottles they are most attracted to. Albee states that because of the perfume bottles and the selection of colors in them indicates that it is specifically marketed to women. She also mentions that the session experience is like having a Tarot card reading, and that one is meant to buy their favorite bottles of color as “color therapy for the soul.” As a result of this research, and on more related color therapies, Albee made “photographs in the most desirable way possible because (she) wanted the work to exist within this paradox around color: you can be circumscribed and exhilarated by it; limited and animated by it.”
Writings by contemporary feminist-based post-colonialist art historian Griselda Pollock's writing, ex. “Avant-Garde Gambits 1888-1893: Gender and the Color of Art History” also contextualize my project interests. In this specific writing Pollock challenges art history's typical interpretation of various 17th-20th C. Western artists’ search of “the other” in far-away lands by arguing that these artists were cultural colonizers. She proposes that one of Gauguin’s paintings of his Tahitian wife… “refers and defers to Manet's Olympia (1863), a notorious avant-garde image of prostitution in the modern city. Where it was seen to differ was in the color of the nude: critics named it a "brown Olympia." Pollock’s careful deconstruction allows her to explore the ways in which racist discourse structures art and art history, posing questions of cultural, sexual and ethnic difference in order to make us all self-critical, not only in regard to the gender, but also to the color of art history.”
For more context, sociologists Angela R. Dixon and Edward E. Telles writing Skin Color and Colorism: Global Research, Concepts, and Measurement in Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 43, 2017, where they examine interdisciplinary global writings concerning skin color and colorism. They maintain that both are related to one's socio-economic status within a culture, as well as the culture's standing in the world. A focus is on Western societies, especially Latin America, where color and colorism are closely related to race and racism. And in Asia, where color and colorism have evolved separately from newer concepts of race and racism. Also noted is the fact that color consciousness and white supremacy increasingly appear to be united, globalized, and commodified, evidenced in the global multibillion-dollar skin-lightening industry. Finally, Dixon and Telles document the growing methodological attention to measurements of skin color and social science data that incorporate skin color measures.
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