While the Black artist Tomashi Jackson was pursuing her MFA from the Yale School of Art in the 2010s, she had a revelation about how our perception of color works. While studying color theory, she had gone back to the basics, rereading foundational texts from her art education – Jackson realized that the way these books talked about color resembled how Americans talk about race.
“I was seeing a lot of similarities in the way color phenomena is described as compulsory,” she said in an interview, “as against one’s will, and potentially discomforting or panic-inducing. Concepts of color are experienced as chromatic, and they are also social.”
