Description
This is the catalog for the 2018 Antenna group exhibition of the same name. Curated by Essence Harden, featured 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, with essays by Gia Hamilton, Olivia K Young of UC Berkeley, Jackie Clay of Coleman Center, and Allison Glenn of Crystal Bridges.
“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.
