What is color? The answer to that question is often that it’s subjective. But such vagueness can somehow still leave intact pale, male, and stale color theories of the past as the default. A gem of a group show, All That Remains at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, spotlights artists who subvert modernist orthodoxies and open up new vistas in how we might relate to color.
The color blue is centered in some of the works on view by Amanda Martínez, Yiyo Tirado, and Liz Deschenes. It is neither the melancholy hue of Picasso’s blue period nor that ethereal color of the Italian Renaissance. But that’s precisely what makes each of their works so captivating — they push blue into other conceptual territories.
Martínez explores Indigenous approaches to rendering water in her sculpture “Working Meditation 1. (Rio Grande)” (2023). In the Rio Grande-area weaving tradition, artists interweave variegated horizontal stripes to evoke rivers. Layering light blue blocks and stripes to form a fluctuating pattern of waves and ripples, the artist invites viewers into an Indigenous connection to land that she calls “querencia.”
