Color Walk

By Amy Sillman

Go on a color tour of your town. Spend a whole day out and about, looking at how color is used and shown everywhere—except at a museum or gallery. You might start with the most obvious uses of color, like the red, green, and yellow of traffic lights. But soon you'll start noticing more and more about how color is used and what it means. Bring a notebook, and write down how colors are used symbolically (to stand for an idea), harmonically (in ways that look pleasing together), as shapes, as warnings, as advertisements, as celebrations, or as expressions of personal taste.

What colors do you like? How do people decorate themselves with color? What kinds of colorful objects are there in the world? What might it mean if a man wears a pink jacket, or a woman wears a bright orange uniform? How are colors used—or not used—in buildings and on outside walls, on billboards, on products, at grocery stores, on TV screens, at parks or city buildings, at police stations or beauty salons, and finally, in art at a museum? What limits or expectations do we have about colors? Are there colors we avoid or try to hide?

Try to focus ONLY on color—nothing else—first out in the world, and THEN at a museum, to study how color works in art. After you've studied color carefully, invent some interventions (small, surprising actions) that use only color. For example, wear or use some color on your own body for a day in a way that is unexpected and unusual. Or, make a colored object or flag and put it in a public place where it sends a mysterious color message that you invented. Then see what happens.

Activity Summary

Topic: Exploring color

Suitable for:

• Beginning level
• Intermediate level
• Advanced level

Suggested media:

• Installation art (art set up in a space)
• Performance art (art made through actions or events)

---

About Amy Sillman

Artist Biography

Born 1955 in Detroit, Michigan
Currently lives in New York, New York

Amy Sillman is an artist whose painting explores the careful balance between the physical materials of painting and its deeper emotional and thoughtful sides. Through bold brushstrokes, drips, dabs, and thick layers of paint, she builds her work in a very physical way. Whether she is creating carefully planned oil paintings or black-ink drawings of her close friends, Sillman's work explores bigger ideas like feminism (equal rights for women), performance, and humor.

Before becoming an artist, Sillman held many different jobs. She worked in a cannery (a factory that packs food into cans) in Alaska, and in a silkscreen factory in Chicago. She also studied the Japanese language and literature for a year at New York University. Eventually, her studies led her to painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. After she graduated, she spent the next ten years creating, experimenting, and learning how to paint.