black is a color: catalogue release and closing

On view: March 10-April 7, 2018
Closing Reception and catalogue release: April 7, 2018, 7-10pm
Daily hours: Tuesday through Sunday 12-5

The catalogue for “black is a color” will include essays by Gia Hamilton, Joan Mitchell Center; Olivia K Young, UC Berkeley; Jackie Clay, Coleman Center; and Allison Glenn, Crystal Bridges. Sounds for the evening provided by DJ Jihaari.

black is a color is a group exhibition curated by Essence Harden, with works by Sadie Barnette, Lauren Halsey, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Texas Isaiah, Patrick Martinez, Azikiwe Mohammed, Devin N. Morris, Nikki Pressley, Adee Roberson
Polo Silk, and Ashely Teamer

“black is a color” asks how color has been employed as a central musing on black subjectivity. The exhibition considers how color—as spectra, chroma, saturation, and vessel—is a utility of/on blackness. In thinking through the process of hyperpigments, in particular, the show centers luster and vibrancy as speculative sites on kin, cosmology, resistance, and place. Here, black optics and corporeality are equally entangled with pleasure and play as with the durability and gravity implied by black. Through each artist’s lens, color comes to (en)compass visions of black life, futures, and presence. In a gesture towards abstraction in which blackness is and is not locatable, then, “black is a color” is an epistemological exploration of black diasporic wonderings.