How Women, Men, and Barack Obama See Colors

When I read an art critic’s cavalier description of the colored tiles in Spencer Finch’s Memory Landscape as “backsplash,” I winced for him. The work is so much more than that. Even the concept is lovely: fill seventy feet of one of the walls at the Obama Presidential Center with tiles in the colors that saturated Barack’s young life in the places that formed him: Nairobi, Chicago, Honolulu, Jakarta.

Finch shrugs off such comments. “The work exists abstractly at first,” he reminds me. “It just looks like a decorative wall that indicates where the bathrooms are.” Then, he continues, “people read the label and understand the connection. I was conscious that the audience at the OPC would be different from an art audience, so I approached the work differently. It’s a way of making a picture that is very specific without using representation. I’m hoping that as people visit more often or spend more time with it, they will get more out of it: think about their own color memories; think about the palette of their own lives.”

Finch has always been fascinated by color, light, and memory. He has kept track of colors in his dreams, done color analysis of different parts of his life. He quotes a line that is sometimes attributed to Paul Cezanne, sometimes to Paul Klee: “‘Color is where the brain and the universe meet.’ It’s incredible that we can see a million colors, that our eyes and brains have developed that way. It’s a way that the world continues to inspire wonder.”

To find Obama’scolors, he began by reading Dreams from My Father. Obama had not been flowery in his place descriptions; the colors he mentioned were usually shades of skin tone. And they changed everywhere he went. As a result, “the way he writes about race is so nuanced, so complex,” says Finch. “He grew up in these different worlds. He understands people, and he understands discrimination.”

Still, what interested Finch was the landscape of Obama’s life. He studied the places and created possible palettes, making sure to include, say, “the powder-blue of the VW bug his sister was driving when she picked him up at the airport in Nairobi.” Then he gave them to Obama and waited.

“I was told he took it very seriously, spent a lot of time.” Grateful, Finch then got to work. When it came time to install the piece, he was ready with a map and numerically coded tiles. One of the construction workers came by, cocked his head, asked a snide question about just what this was supposed to be. “A lot of people think abstraction is very silly,” Finch concedes. “But when someone explained what it was, the guy got very excited and started asking about the different colors.”

Now he hopes that kids, especially, get engaged in decoding the piece, wondering if that clear golden yellow is hibiscus, Hawaii’s state flower, and that blushing orange-red reminds Obama of the mangoes in Jakarta. And maybe later wondering what colors their own lives paint….

We could have looked at these places on a map or Google Earth. We could have glanced through photos or read Wikipedia articles about them. These methods would give us visual facts about the settings. But short of climbing inside young Barack’s skull, there is no way to move from the facts of a place to its feel. Color opens the imagination. We have our own emotional, instinctive response to each palette, and that lets us wonder about his. We can sense the places that shaped him.

Smells and sounds would have been evocative, too—which is why museums are adding them to exhibits these days. Finally, we are learning to trust our common senses.

We are also learning how variable those common senses are. Old people see color differently than young; artists have a vocabulary, and therefore an acuity of perception, that engineers might not. And women see far more shades of color than men do, and have better color vision in low light. Maybe evolution’s way of letting mothers check on a little one’s flush of fever in the middle of the night?

All I know is, when my husband said he wanted his office painted white, I asked him what shade of white. He looked at me blankly. When I handed him several dozen swatches, he paled to yet another variant—call it Bemused Husband. When researchers had men and women try to match test color strips with shade charts, women gave more correct responses and took less time deciding. Another study showed women able to distinguish tiny differences between colors that looked identical to men. (The guys, however, are better at perceiving fine details, rapid movement, and changes in brightness across space, which helps with facial recognition. Friend or enemy?)

Randall Munroe, creator of the XKCD webcomic, had some fun with the perception difference, taking an informal survey in which, shown the same image, female participants named thirty colors and males named seven. As the survey continued, the guys got a little frustrated: “I WILL EAT YOUR HEART WITH A FUCKING SPOON IF YOU AKS ANY MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT COLORS,” one commented. When Munroe pressed for color names, women chose “blush pink,” “dusty lavender,” “butter yellow,” “dusky rose.” Men chose “gay,” “WTF,” “dunno,” “baige.”

Obama is a bit more sensitive to color than that. Also to art and its role in public life. He chose Finch after seeing his work at the 9/11 museum. “I have a picture of him in front of that piece,” confides Finch, “hanging in my studio.” The OPC commission felt even more central to the life of the nation.

The title he initially chose was To Disappear Enhances, from an Emily Dickinson poem. “I think the OPC felt it was too obscure,” he says ruefully. “But ‘to disappear enhances’ to me means it’s about this idea of color memory. When you can no longer see something, your experience is enhanced by the remembering and longing for that color.”

I could take the analogy further. When you have seen instances of democracy working—when you have seen compassion and thoughtfulness and problems being solved and at least the possibility of old prejudices easing—those images soak into your mind and heart. You remember how they looked and felt, and you long to see them again.

The post appeared first on Common Reader.