The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA
June 2017
June 4, 2017–Apr 1, 2018
The Underground Museum presents Artists of Color, the third exhibition curated by the late artist Noah Davis, showcasing color-driven work in the form of monochrome, hard-edge, and color field painting, as well as immersive installations that focus on acts of visual perception, a fundamental building block of aesthetic experience. Varied and vibrant hues made by paint, plexiglass, fluorescent tubes, and pigment sculptures offer an opportunity to reflect on the various ways that color has been defined and deployed by different time periods and cultures.
On view are some of the most well-known names in contemporary art, including Josef Albers, Michael Asher, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, Jennie C. Jones, and Donald Judd, among others. Key artworks include Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Forbidden Colors (1988), a monochrome triptych in the colors of the Palestinian flag, and an adaptation of Diana Thater’s RGB Windows for MOCA (2001) presented in The Underground Museum’s Purple Garden. Additional highlights added posthumously to Noah Davis’s original artist list are Davis’s own 2004 (1) (2008), from his Swing State series created during President Obama’s first election campaign, and a West Coast exhibition debut for the 102-year-old painter, Carmen Herrera.