Colour Theory Has Politics - Paul Lessard

Paul Lessard on why the representations we arrive at don't have to converge. Colour theory looks as if it simply is, but it carries politics and economics. His example is Faith Ringgold, the Black American painter and quilter, and the posters she made for the Black Panthers: backgrounds of orange and deep green, and shadows lighter than their surroundings, but purple, because she wanted to centre Black people rather than draw an abstract black line between background and foreground. We reach conclusions that work, he argues, but there was an enormous, likely infinite, range of others we could