CREATIVE RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
For the PhD Creative Research Symposium, I presented 30 or more images of research praxis works, i. e., images of my abstract paintings, collected color theory and skin tone charts, plus digital ephemera, and a photograph while I formally read my Confirmation of Registration A. Detailed Research Report revised Abstract, Introduction & Research Questions:
ABSTRACT
Reframing: On Abstract Painting, Color & Otherness is a practice-led thesis project consisting of abstract paintings, sculpture, an analytical written thesis, and documented artist interviews, all of which are framed within the recent re-gendering of what is now referred to as the proto-feminist origins of European abstract painting, as well as the current re-gendering of 1950s American abstract expressionism. Intersectional color theory, and identity issues of ethnicity/race, gender, and sexuality are examined in the praxis work by using color palettes inspired by my own othered existence as an olive-complexioned, 2nd generation Italian American female abstract painter.
The literature review includes investigations into phenomenology, philosophy of color, traditional and feminist aesthetics, traditional and feminist art history, and intersectional color theory. Historical antecedents, such as Hilma af Klint’s “Staggering”: The Ten Largest, Youth, 1907, and other 20th and 21st Century abstract paintings by mostly female identifying abstract painters are referenced. The significance of women abstract painters, virtually sidelined for the past century, is only recently being re-evaluated, which frames or contextualizes the praxis and thesis.
Attention is paid to current art historical reshuffling of positions and attributions, for example, previously the first abstract painting was credited to Wassily Kandinsky, with his “First Abstract Watercolor”, 1913. The praxis and thesis are both constructed in the context of this current art historical reframing, which is effectively a re-gendering of the genre of abstract painting’s origins, now described as proto-feminist. Via artist interviews, answers to questions posed, reveal if and how influences of autobiography, art history, traditional color theory, and what formal or personal aesthetics influences the nine interviewed “othered” abstract painters, and one “control” interviewee, a white male abstract painter.
The written thesis is comprised of several analytical essays, which are framed within Linda Nochlin based feminist art history and Carolyn Korsmeyer described feminist aesthetics. They are constructed using Laurie Schneider Adams’ outlined methodologies of art, including formalism, iconography, Cixcousian-based feminism, autobiography, auto-ethnography, de Saussure’s structural linguistics, Derrida’s methods of deconstruction, and Freudian-based psychoanalysis as lenses by which praxis artworks and some artist interviewees’ works are analyzed. The practice-led thesis project aims to evoke what Clive Bell termed significant form or aesthetic emotions.
INTRODUCTION
The initial academic ideas for the thesis project Reframing: On Abstract Painting, Color & Otherness came to me during the spring of 2021 while preparing to teach an academic color theory course for undergraduate painters titled Relativity of Color. Because I teach at the City University of New York, who’s institutional vision statement cites offering an “Equitable education in a more inquisitive world”, and because the majority of enrolled students are immigrants or children of immigrants from post-colonial Caribbean countries and territories, i.e., the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, in addition to researching color from traditional formalist and scientific perspectives, I also investigated it through other academic lenses. And because throughout my 24-year long teaching career, I have offered art studio and art history courses using inclusive theoretical approaches and methods, my offering color theory from a multi-faceted, intersectional perspective makes sense to me.
So, since Spring 2021, I have been reading about artists and art writers’ investigations and uses of color to discuss their relationship to their own or others’ art, art history, culture, ethnography, gender, globalism, race, psychology, and science. It led to my initial philosophical inquiries, which were in phenomenology. Then during September 2021, I became more personally and emotionally engaged in my project while preparing for one of the Transart Institute of Creative Studies’ PhD orientation sessions, “Critiquing the Critique” with Jean Marie Casbarian. As I watched the assigned video, The Room of Silence, I thought again of my CUNY students, and I also thought of my own CUNY ethnic status, which is a listed “protected” class, Italian American. I am a 2nd generation immigrant via two of my maternal great-grandparents, and one maternal grandfather who were early 20th Century Italian immigrants to the United States, and through two of my paternal great-grandparents who were late 19th C. Sicilian immigrants.
What struck me in The Room of Silence, a documentary of Rhode Island School of Design students of color and mixed ethnicities speaking about their white-dominant classroom and life experiences, was upon hearing one specific student’s comment regarding her being ‘exotic looking’ and what effect hearing this has had on her. Her recounting it set off in my own mind reverberating memories of being referred to in this exact way. Like this The Room of Silence student, I also did not experienced being called ‘exotic looking’ as a complement, nor as an intended slight. It simply puzzled me, but now, for the first time in my life, it dawned on me that it is one way that in my own culture I have also been othered. In that, my own ‘exoticism’ became a catalyst in my praxis work and thesis writing. (Dominique, 2021)
It led me to researching feminist aesthetics, which along with color theory and phenomenology research, helped me establish the reason for my praxis, which is to develop a unique body of abstract paintings that will add more ‘other’ creative works and academic writing to the creative research cannons. Similarly, the aim of my praxis and thesis is to add my own feminine, ‘othered’ artworks and academic writing to the record, which for millennia has excluded virtually all female expression and scholarship. Viewer-readers will be interested in the creative research project and written analysis because of the auto-ethnographic perspective of a 21st Century, 2nd generation Italian American female abstract painter-academic’s point of view, which includes my intersectional perspective on assimilation, abstract painting, and color theory. The inclusion of my creative research and analytical written thesis into the academic record will contribute an-other unique and contrasting perspective, which prior to the ‘academic plasticity’ of the 1970’s, was not regularly included.
The academic and cultural problem that Reframing: On Abstract Painting, Color & Otherness attempts to solve is to continue to make more inclusive the creative research and academic cannons by including other historically discounted or omitted, specifically feminine archives into its depositories. The scope of the project involves collecting relevant ephemera, producing original abstract paintings, sculpture, and photographs, then mounting edited selections into a 2023 public solo art exhibition, and producing and depositing a 40,000-word analytical written text into the creative scholarship record.
The main argument or claim is that scholarly research fields of philosophy of art, aesthetics, color theory, and art institution collections, have historically, that is for millennia, included only the creative works and scholarly research of white males, while simultaneously, systematically excluding the scholarly and creative works by all others. Only recently, that is within the last five decades, have institutions and academia started to become more inclusive of others’ creative and formal academic research. As others, me included, create, participate in, and add artifacts, creative works, research and writings to art collections and academic institutions, then creative research dialogues, theoretical discourses, and philosophical debates become more diverse, richer and more broadly reflective of humanities’ depth and breadth.
Specifically, my "Chromerotic" paintings are motivated by my auto-ethnographic perceptions, by my perceptions of color, and by my subconscious. The palettes are influenced by the Fitzpatrick Skin Type Scale, used since the 1970s to determine SPF levels required to prevent sunburn, by its predecessor the Von Luschan Scale, developed 100 years prior that classified ethnic populations via skin color and race, by the Pantone SkinTone Guide, by various beauty industry product promotional color charts, and by my own complexion. Mine lines up with the listed charts’ middle shades often labeled “olive'' or “tan”, which led to my mixing the under-paintings’ fleshy, olive-y shades.
I inherited my coloring from my olive-complected parents, born to their respective olive-skinned parents. My great-grandparents and grandparents were marginalized in Europe, specifically by northern Italians, and after they immigrated, in the United States for being “impure”, lesser-than Mediterranean people. In slang, they were referred to as Dagos, Wops, greaseballs, Guidos, and other pejoratives. They were among the 5 million southern Italian refugees to the US and 30 million globally, who between 1880-1980 permanently fled their homelands. For context, during the same 100-year period, Italy's total population was between 30-56 million. (Population of Italy 1770-2020|Statista)
By the mid-20th century, it was broadly acknowledged that no scientific evidence of race exists, and some including the Mediterranean race were subsumed. So, while I am 91% descended from olive toned Mediterranean peoples. That is DNA testing calculates that I am comprised of 61% southern Italian, and a combined 30% Greek, Ashkenazi Jewish, Western Asian and North African DNA patterns, so along with all living olive-skinned populations, throughout my life, I and my generation’s tan-toned counterparts are counted white.
Assimilated white status has afforded me access to educational, socio-economic, and many other privileged opportunities that my Italian diaspora ancestors did not have. Along with their basic need motivations, i.e., work, food, homes, they also immigrated with the hope that my generation would thrive in the ways that we do. So, while I have heartache for the mistreatment and the hardships they endured, my paternal great-grandfather was murdered on a return trip to Sicily, and regret for not knowing any of my other Italian born relatives, languages, or lands, mostly I have gratitude for their courage and foresight.
I consider why the absorption of olive and tan colored ethnic communities into whiteness is practiced, and surmise that it stems from a kind of global derma chroma-phobia, a fear of skin color. I note that referring to one another in exclusively black-and white terms is polarizing and flawed because collectively, humanity is chromatically diverse and nuanced.
Though olive skin tones are still a focus in the beauty industry, I realize that I and my swarthy sisters are a target market, which only serves as a reminder that the current global capitalist system commodifies olive complexions as prior systems commodified my ancestors’ whole bodies.
Finally, I am cognizant that the gestural mark-making in my painting, which some have likened to abstracted graffiti, has psychosexual overtones and/or a figurative quality not generally apparent in my oeuvre. This is virtually inevitable given the skin tone and make-up color palette inspirations, and I like this fact, as I regard paint as a sensual medium, and painting as a consummately sensuous act.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. How can I create post-feminist abstract paintings and artworks that pay homage to the proto-feminist originated abstract painting genre, that comment on relevant-to-21st Century identity issues regarding gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and which are also personally invested?
2. Given that 21st Century art historical scholarship reveals that more than a century after the inception of the abstract painting genre manifested in the west, that is, we have learned during the 21st Century that the genre was initiated by late 19th/early 20th Century female artists, in particular by Hilma af Klint, and was not originated as the prior century texts maintained, by Wassily Kandinsky, what is signified by the current re-gendering of abstract painting’s origins?
3. In a series of written essays, how might I apply intersectional approaches to analyzing my own post-feminist, abstract paintings and works by abstract painters whom I have interviewed?
