The Ethics of Color

Color isn’t normally an issue in the Northwest Corner, unless it’s a year when the fall foliage doesn’t measure up. But a summer lecture series in Norfolk, “The Ethics of Color,” puts the issue front and center—color in its relation to aesthetic theory, to human rights, to environmental degradation.

The series is sponsored by the Yale Norfolk School of Art and is the brainchild of the program’s new co-directors, Byron Kim and Lisa Sigal. Both are working artists based in Brooklyn. Kim teaches at Yale, and Sigal is affiliated with The Drawing Center in New York City.

The idea, Kim explains, was to identify a thread that ran through the work of a group of artists and scholars, then more or less to give them their head. “We chose the speakers because we thought they related, loosely, and now we just want them to talk about their work,” says Kim.

Next in the roster of lecturers—the series began on May 23 with Tomashi Jackson, an artist represented in this year’s Whitney Biennial—is Susan Schuppli, a Swiss Canadian artist whose work explores the ways in which the Earth is registering the Anthropocene, the era dominated by the environmental impact of human activities. And color plays its part, whether it’s the opalescent sheen of an oil spill, the increasingly dark snows of the Arctic, the smogscapes of major cities or the irradiated zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima. These produce what Schuppli calls “extreme images,” an archive of material wrongs. The Schuppli lecture is on Friday, June 7, at 7 p.m.

Aruna D’Souza, who will lecture on June 13, is a writer who has been a central figure in discussions of race in the U.S. art world. Her book “Whitewalling” addressed the controversy over a painting in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, in which a white artist, Dana Schutz, portrayed the body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American lynched in Mississippi in the mid-1950s. D’Souza’s lecture at Yale Norfolk will focus on the art of Lorraine O’Grady (b. 1934) and a show O’Grady curated, “The Black and White Show,” in New York’s Lower East Side in 1983. Wanting to provide an alternative to the era’s segregated art world, O’Grady staged a rigidly egalitarian show, inviting 14 black and 14 white artists to contribute works—in black and white. The show, largely ignored at the time but increasingly admired in retrospect, is the subject of a forthcoming book by D’Souza.

Tavia Nyong’o, an American cultural critic, historian and performance studies scholar, will deliver the final lecture, on June 20, discussing his research on José Munõz’s last and unfinished work, “The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance,” and his thoughts about the color brown as a “certain ‘ground’ of color.”

The lectures, which are free and open to the public, are held on the Yale Norfolk campus, in what was once the home of the elegant Eldridge sisters on the village Green, 

The Norfolk Lecture Series is at Battell House, 20 Litchfield Road. All lectures start at 7 p.m. and are followed by a reception. For more information, visit www.art.yale.edu/Norfolk.