Golboo Amani, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Brendan Fernandes, Aryen Hoekstra, Manolo Lugo, Kika Nicolela, Jude Norris, Kristina Lee Podesva
Edited by Johnson Ngo
With texts by Emelie Chhangur, Francisco-Fernando Granados, and Johnson Ngo.
Book
Digital publication, 78 pages
Full colour
Published by
Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto Mississauga) in 2017
FREE.
Click here to download
Red, Green, Blue ≠ White is the catalog produced for the 2013 exhibition at the Blackwood of the same name. Curated by Johnson Ngo, then-Curator-in-Residence at the Blackwood Gallery, the exhibition brought together eight artists exploring the the intersections of colour theory and contemporary race and identity politics. Included in this publication are commissioned essays and artist projects that depart from that 2013 exhibition, reflecting on notions of performativity, hybridity, and intersectionality.
Launch event
Please join us to celebrate the launch of these two new publications, produced by the Blackwood Gallery this summer.
Take Care and Red Green Blue ≠ White
Publications Launch Party
Thursday, August 17
6pm–9pm
Studio.89
1065 Canadian Place, Suite 104
Mississauga, ON
Refreshments provided. A FREE shuttle bus will depart downtown Toronto from Mercer Union, 1286 Bloor Street West at 6pm, returning for 9pm.
7pm: Letters & Handshakes (Greig de Peuter and Christine Shaw) on Take Care
7:15pm: Roundtable with Take Care broadsheet contributors Lauren Fournier, Lynx Sainte-Marie, and Sarah Sharma
8pm: Curator and Editor Johnson Ngo remarks on Red Green Blue ≠ White
8:15pm: Group reading of Other forms of conviviality…, a series of scores by Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, published in The Blackwood: Take Care
...it would probably be a better world if we didn’t use colour terms at all to designate groups of people. Failing that, it might well be better if we used other terms, like pink, and grey olive, to refer to what we now call white people, partly because they are less loaded, partly because this would break up the monolithic identity, whiteness.
— Richard Dyer
To understand how white is seen as the norm, we must shift between present and past tenses, looking to the prevalence of whiteness within western European art and popular culture. In the above quotation, film and critical race theorist Richard Dyer expresses frustration at the racial categorization established by German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the late eighteenth century, according to which people are divided into five so-called “natural varieties” of red, yellow, brown, black, and white. Against an understanding of this colourist history, the exhibition Red, Green, Blue ≠ White explored colour in its multitude of physical characteristics, forms, and subtle gestures that allude to race and the construction of identity.
—Excerpted from curatorial essay by Johnson Ngo
Artists
Golboo Amani
Chun Hua Catherine Dong
Brendan Fernandes
Aryen Hoekstra
Manolo Lugo
Kika Nicolela
Jude Norris
Kristina Lee Podesva
Curator/Editor
Johnson Ngo
Writers
Emelie Chhangur
Francisco-Fernando Granados
Publisher: Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga
Designer: Drew Lesiuczok
Editorial Support: Gina Badger, Alison Cooley, Sara Rozenberg, Jayne Wilkinson
Copy Editors: Alison Cooley, Jayne Wilkinson
Image: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, After Olympia (2011).
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
