Spring Lecture Series
Color in Modern and Contemporary Art?
April 7: Introduction, Monochromes, and the Primary Colors
April 14: White Out / Paint it Black
April 21: Neon
April 28: Postwar Women
May 5: Psychedelia
May 12: On Screen
About the Series
In Spring 2025 we will explore a wide-ranging and, at times, unexpected approach to the role of color in modern and contemporary art practice. The story of color in modern art tends to begin in French art circles of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters who incorporated new ideas learned from the science of vision. Their techniques were pushed to further extremes by the Fauvists, and, later, artists channeling ideas about synesthesia and the spiritual qualities of color in Germany and elsewhere. We’ll begin briefly with this more familiar story, and pick up where it leaves off in the 1910s. Topics will include phenomena like the absence of color in modern art, the impact made by counter-cultural experiments, and the influence of new technologies. Each session will offer a different approach to re-thinking and re-imagining color throughout art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Lecturer
My first book, which is titled Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, was published by MIT Press in 2014. It examines the breadth of ecological thought across artistic and social practices during these formative decades for environmentalism. More recent projects include, Second Site, which explores new methodologies for understanding the relationship between site-specificity and duration, and The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Polotics of Environment (volume co-edited with Lyle Massey), that examines interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of desert environments in both experimental modernist culture and ecological disaster.
