Color Walk

By Amy Sillman

Go on a color tour of your town. Spend a whole day out and about, looking closely at how color is used and expressed everywhere—except in a museum or gallery. You might start with the most obvious examples, like the red, green, and yellow of traffic lights. But soon you'll notice more and more ways that color shows up around you.

Bring a notebook and write down how colors are used. Are they symbolic (standing for an idea), harmonic (working together nicely), shaped in certain ways, used as warnings, used in advertisements, used for celebrations, or simply reflecting someone's personal taste? What colors do you like? How do people use color to decorate themselves? What kinds of colorful objects exist in the world around you?

Think about what a color might mean. What does it suggest when a man wears a pink jacket, or a woman wears a bright orange uniform? Notice how color is used—or left out—in buildings and outdoor walls, on billboards, on products, in grocery stores, on TV screens, at parks or government buildings, at police stations, or at beauty salons. Finally, think about how color is used in art at a museum. What limits or expectations do we have about color? Are there places or situations where color seems to be avoided or held back?

Try to pay attention to color only—nothing else—first out in the real world, and then in a museum, to see how color works in art. After you've studied color carefully, try inventing your own small color experiments. For example, wear or use a color on your body for a day in a way that's unexpected or unusual. Or make a colored object or flag and place it somewhere in public, sending a mysterious color message that only you understand. Then see what happens.

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Activity Summary

Topic: Exploring color

Suitable for:

• Beginning level
• Intermediate level
• Advanced level

Suggested media:

• Installation art
• Performance art

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About Amy Sillman

Artist Biography

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

Amy Sillman is an artist whose paintings explore the relationship between the physical materials of painting—like paint and canvas—and deeper ideas, emotions, and concepts. Using bold brushstrokes, dabs, drizzles, and thick layers of paint, she builds her artwork in a very physical, hands-on way. Whether she's creating carefully composed oil paintings or simple black-ink drawings of close friends, Sillman's work explores big ideas such as feminism (equality between genders), performativity (how identity can be expressed through action), and humor.

Before becoming an artist, Sillman held many different jobs. She worked in a fish cannery in Alaska and a silkscreen-printing factory in Chicago, and she studied Japanese language and literature for a year at New York University. Eventually, her path led her to study painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. After graduating, she spent the next ten years creating, experimenting, and learning the craft of painting.