A Color Walk

An art-making activity by Amy Sillman

Go on a color tour of your town: spend an entire day out and about, observing how color is used and expressed everywhere except at a museum or gallery. You might start with the most obvious examples—like the red, yellow, and green of traffic lights—but soon you'll begin noticing far more about how color is used, what it expresses, and what it means.

Bring a notebook and jot down observations about how colors function. Are they used symbolically (standing for an idea) or harmonically (working together pleasingly)? Are they shaped into patterns, used as warnings, used in advertisements, used to mark celebrations, or simply chosen as personal style? What colors do you like? How do people use color to decorate themselves? What colorful objects exist in the world around you? What might it mean if you saw a man in a pink jacket, or a woman in a bright orange uniform?

Pay attention to how color is used—or avoided—in architecture and on building exteriors, billboards, product packaging, grocery stores, TV screens, parks, government buildings, police stations, and beauty salons. Finally, notice how color is used in art at a museum. What limits or expectations do we place on color? Where do we hold back from using it?

Try to focus on only color—nothing else—first out in the world, and then at a museum, to study how color functions in art. After making a thorough study of color, invent your own small experiments using color alone. For example, wear or display a color on your own body for a day in a way that feels unexpected or unusual. Or create a colored object or flag, place it somewhere public, and let it send a mysterious "color message" of your own invention—then see how people react.

---

Activity Summary

Topic: Exploring color

Suitable for:

• Beginning level
• Intermediate level
• Advanced level

Suggested media:

• Installation art
• Performance art

---

About Amy Sillman

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

Amy Sillman is an artist whose painting practice centers on the careful balance between the physical, material qualities of paint and its emotional, psychological, and conceptual meaning. Using bold gestures, dabs, drizzles, and thick layers of paint, she builds her work through an intensely physical process. Whether she is creating tightly composed oil paintings or loose black-ink drawings of close friends, Sillman's work explores larger themes such as feminism, performance, and humor.

Before becoming an artist, Sillman held a variety of jobs. She worked in a fish cannery in Alaska and a silkscreen-printing factory in Chicago, and she spent a year studying Japanese language and literature 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 teaching herself how to paint.