White Paint Series

The pieces in the WHITE PAINT series use research and inquiry into the charged names of commercial household paint colors and pigments to explore, among other things, the intersection of race and aesthetics, with particular attention to the rhetoric of white supremacy and racism in everyday cultural productions. My project centers a reflective investigation into whiteness, turning the “camera,” linguistic, and textual frameworks on American and other cultural productions and institutions, from my position as a white woman. 

Color Correct, 42 1/2 x 35 1/2 inches, charcoal, oil pastels, acrylic paint, text, glue, painters' tape, 2025.  

This piece includes the lyrics to “In the Evening” featured in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The song is playing while the Tramp rehearses his famous singing number, the very first time we hear the Tramp’s voice on screen. I used the lyrics of this song, employing a shredded and torn paper technique, to point to the lyric’s troubling nostalgia for the pleasures of plantation life for “the old [white] folks.” Working in this visual medium has enabled me to illustrate the sound (which points to the visual imaginary) of the plantation inside Modern Times, and then, to connect this early 20th-century text to the present by incorporating material from a New York Times article about the regulation of the color of bees in Austria, and the controversy over Behr Paints name—Climate Change—for a shade of white. Texts in this piece also include material from “The Correct Color of Bees? A State’s Nazi Past Fuels a Toxic Debate,” New York Times, February 5, 2023 and Frank Jacobs’ “Chilling maps of lynchings in 1930s America.” Big Think, April 16, 2016. It also features the names of a variety of commercial household paint colors.

Could(n't) Say Sure, 36 x 23 inches, paper, charcoal, acrylic and oil paint and pastels, text, glue, 2025.

This piece  includes language from “Original Depositions of the Lynching in Marion, Indiana August 13, 14 & 15 1930.” Marion Public Library, July 2003 and James Cameron’s A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story, Black Classic Press, 1982. 

High Reflective White, 28 x 19 1/2 inches, paper, acrylic paint, charcoal, oil sticks, glue, 2025.

This piece includes text from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: a Biography (1928), a foundational experimental and queer text which opens with a scene of Orlando as a boy swiping with a sword at the “head of a moor”; and a photocopy of “Queen Mother pendant mask (Iyoba) from the Court of Benin, Nigeria, 16th century. Ivory, iron and copper” from the catalog: Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas by Alisa LaGamma, Joanne Pillsbury, Eric Kjellgren and Yaëlle Biro. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014, and a detail from blueprints for a dental building in Litchfield Park, AZ. High Reflective White is a Sherwin Williams paint color name. 

Audubon in Haiti, 12 x 9 inches, oil pastels, text, paint chips, acrylic paint, 2025.

This piece  uses paint chips from diverse companies and language from Audubon quoted in John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes, Vintage, 2006. 12 x 9 inches, paper, oil pastels, text, paint chips, acrylic paint, 2025.

Optic White, 23 ¾ x 15 ¼ inches, paper, charcoal, oil paint, glue, 2025-26.

It includes an image of Virginia Stephens (Woolf), two of her brothers and others associated with the Bloomsbury group in blackface from February 1910 when they boarded the British naval ship the H.M.S. Dreadnought, pretending to be the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. The group used an invented language that is a mashup of Greek and Latin with some Swahili.  Kevin Young reported the story of the Dreadnaught Hoax in “The Time Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface” in The New Yorker (2017). The text in the piece is from a Benjamin Moore product publication for its “Off White Collection.” The title “optic white” recalls Ralph Ellison’s use of this phrase in Invisible Man.

Marbles, 36 x 24 inches, paper, paint chips, text, acrylic paint, oil pastels, glue, 2025.

Moonlight, 12 x 9 inches, paper, acrylic marker, charcoal, calligraphy paper, thread, paint chips, glue acrylic paint, 2025.

It  includes the text—“White pigments do not absorb any part of the visible spectrum”—from Pigments edited by Barbara H. Berrie et al. Princeton University, 2024; “the no boundary condition for the universe” is from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, 1988; “these whites are ready to roll!” is from a Valspar Paint product brochure from Lowe’s. 

As of Yet, 12x 16 inches; oil sticks, oil paint, text, glue, paper.

In a Word, 24 x 20 inches, paper, acrylic marker, acrylic paint, text, photocopy, calligraphy paper, thread, glue, 2025. 

Insistence on the Myth, 22 x 15 inches, paper, calligraphy paper, photocopies, text, charcoal, acrylic paint, 2025.

It includes a detail from Lawrence Beitler’s photograph “Marion Lynching, 1930” and a still of Amy Cooper in Central Park 2020.

Framed, 12 x 9 inches, black acrylic paint , glue, notebook tabs, on paper, 2025.