Contemplating Color in Modern Art, Empowering Voices with the youth of Covenant House
Post by Rachel Phillips
The High Museum of Art partners with several youth and community organizations in the Atlanta area. I recently had the privilege of offering a tour and workshop to the youth of Covenant House, an organization that provides food, shelter and care to homeless young adults. I worked with a bright and chatty group of six and we had a wonderful time together.
Young adults, particularly disadvantaged youth, often struggle, and lack opportunities, to express themselves. Homeless youth can feel mute and powerless. Translating the feelings of chaos and the burdens they carry into orderly sentences can be an excruciating task.
The workshop organized here at the High Museum was developed with the hopes of creating a safe space for these teens to express themselves. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words: although self-expression can often present itself as a challenge, art can offer a unique and powerful platform for sparking discussion. Our topic for their visit was to explore how colors can convey emotions. Color is an almost universal experience and has been used by artists to carry meaning and emote on their behalf for centuries. We felt that color would make both an accessible lens for viewing artwork and an entry point for discussion during our tour.
My group was quiet and a little hesitant at first. All were first time visitors to the museum, my favorite kind. Walking through the Stent Wing, they stared up, wide eyed and open mouthed as the sunlight filtered through the glass panes four stories above them and rested on their faces.
As the elevator doors closed behind us, I explained that we would be exploring color and emotions in art. But before we dove into the galleries, I wanted to open with something a little more familiar.
I started with the walls. White. I asked: “What does white mean to you?”
I was impressed by the depth and breadth of their shyly offered answers: “Serenity, purity, cleanliness, a blank slate.”
“How do white walls make you feel?”
A few more spoke up, “Sanitized, cold, impressive, perfection.”
My heart sunk.
Youth who once felt voiceless here had the opportunity to speak. They were able to speak in a space that, despite our efforts as museum educators to facilitate warm feelings, open up dialogue and create opportunities to engage, is a space that often thwarts us. White walls, although good as a blank slate, can also leave people feeling marginalized.
“Why would we choose white walls for an art museum?”
After a pause, one teen replied, “They can act as a frame, they aren’t distracting.”
I smiled.
Philip Guston (American, born Canada, 1913 – 1980), Painter, 1959, Oil on canvas
To dive into color, we naturally chose to visit examples of modern art from the museum’s permanent collection, works that often inspire the response, “I just don’t get it.” Sitting on the floor looking up at Philip Guston’s Painter, we talked about what we saw. I didn’t tell them the artist’s name or background, or even the title of the piece. I simply invited them to look and to talk.
They felt and saw a great deal, and they shared these feelings: “Heavy, dark, angry.”
Why? “The colors. The messy brushstrokes.”
One young woman was quite combative in her language. I loved her. “I just don’t get why this is in an art museum. What does the label say? Who was he? Why is his work in a museum?”
I finally acquiesced and read the label.
It included a quote by Harold Rosenberg, a writer and art critic for the New Yorker who coined the term “action painting.” It read, “A painting that as an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist…The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”
The experience I had with these students not only allowed them to convey their feelings, but also helped me to begin to understand their perspectives. Many of these youth have entered into darkness I could never feign to understand. The tempestuous colors of Guston’s Painter, however, helped me begin to learn more about them and their experience of the world. We were able to share a common ground: Here at the museum we came together to unravel and interpret the common experience of color, of gesture, of joy of process and the intrinsic beauty of materials.
Mark Rothko (American, 1903–1970), #73, 1952, Oil on canvas
It is so terribly simple on paper. But staring up at Mark Rothko's #73 and asking “Why?” leads to the plumbing of deep personal truths.
I spoke to them about how modern art was like poetry; these paintings embody the elegance and challenge of saying the most with limited materials. By limiting the viewer’s experience to nonrepresentational imagery, they are being offered a haiku rather than a tome. How did the vibrating slabs of color in the Rothko translate to my group of six?
“Warm, hungry, peaceful, sunrise…Lion King.”
They compared Rothko to Guston, speculating about their personalities. They decided that Rothko must have been very “chill,” and that Guston seemed more energetic and moody.
Like many hundreds, maybe thousands, before us, the more we looked at #73, the more we found.
When the first flippant, “Why?” at the beginning of our tour that was lobbed at Painter transformed into an awe-filled “Why?” while standing before the Rothko, I realized what a powerful experience this had been for all of us.
Working with young adults and art, I often think of my favorite quote by Emily Bronte: “I have dreamed dream in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”
After a tour or outreach I sometimes ask myself, “But really, did we help them, did we teach them?”
I think of my group from Covenant House, and of how long we stood staring at Rothko #73, peering deeper and deeper into the translucent layers of color, and looking further into ourselves. I wonder: how did the image stain their consciousness?
I saw the first effects in the art room at Covenant House, where I hauled out the paint, colored pencils and stencils. In response to the tour, they were given the assignment to depict an emotion, mood or memory, and to do so without using representational images.
Some made puddles of envy and smears of confusion. The girl who earlier asked “Why?” struggled with her stencil set, asking several times for a fresh sheet of paper to start over. I encouraged her to let go, and just to enjoy the act of painting. “Don’t try to make something,” I said, “Remember the artists we saw?” I urged her to let the movements and colors translate into her intentions on their own.
She grabbed a bottle and squirted a blob on to her paper, then jabbed it with her paintbrush. She smiled. Out came a second tube, and then a third. She became reckless and exuberant in her application. She mixed, smeared and piled on more paint than the paper could handle, and still added more and more. We needed to get this girl a canvas. When asked to present at the end, her paper buckling under the weight of the paint, she said triumphantly, “This is how I feel right now. Mixed up.”
Each of them stood up and presented on what they had created. Some were eager to try painting more on their own, while others wanted to return to the High Museum for a second visit. We didn’t talk about their history. Frankly, it’s none of my business. But we did unlock something: together, we saw that perhaps the best autobiography is made not with our words, but through the things we create and the colors we choose. Whether frenetic, stippled jolts or translucent washes layered onto our life’s canvases over many years—maybe this is a better lens with which to view ourselves then through our limited vocabularies. Did we find the answer? Did we solve ourselves? No, but really, isn’t that what all those canvases hanging in our museum are aiming at, isn’t that what we’re all grasping for? But, enough words. As Rothko said, “Silence is so accurate.”