The Art Assignment

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYING] We're in Indianapolis today, inside the new Global Distribution Headquarters for Cummins Inc. designed by architect Deborah Berke.

I'm standing in front of a new, six-floor wall painting by Philadelphia-based artist Odili Donald Odita, who we're going to be speaking with today.

This new work, titled The Wisdom of Trees, was inspired by Odita's visit to the Eero Saarinen-designed designed Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, as well as his interest in trees as metaphors for adaptability and change.

Odita is an amazingly talented colorist, whose dynamic compositions are rendered directly on the wall, as well as on canvas and panel.

He explores a wide range of ideas through a language of abstraction that he has developed and evolved over a number of years.

In his works, color is not a mere hue or means of representing things in the world, but is a way of considering how color can reflect the complexity of social, and cultural, and political context.

Color and color theory are things that we learn about from a very early age.

But Odita is going to encourage us to reconsider our approach and think about color in a much more complex and contingent way.

Hi.

I'm Odili Donald Odita, and this is your Art Assignment.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Color for me is super important, but I really see it specific to, say, periods, or times, or cultures.

I mean, for me, that's how I really engage color.

Like for instance, you can say, oh, 80s color or, you know, 90s color.

Like I like to look at color in these ways, in the sense of how it might have been used commercially, how might have been used aesthetically, how changes in a painter's work as well, between painters-- cubist colors versus pop color.

You know, so for me, it's color plays in a lot of these different contexts for me.

And I know with the color that I saw in the house, it was-- color like that, it's almost too period specific for me to actually go forward with that.

But I did play with the notions a little bit.

But I credit, really, my mother and having to go with her to-- she loved to go to garage sales and just relax, shopping.

And that always just-- she'd take us along as taking care of the kids.

She'd take us along.

And I'd always look at stuff.

And I'd always look at-- I'd always appreciate the color of stuff.

And that kind of, maybe, gave me my education of being able to like place color in time frames or, you know, time capsules, be able to say like, this is from this period and that period-- just looking at things.

Yeah, I think that it's really great for me to watch the students I work with, when they're dealing with color, to actually express their fear of it, because it's really-- I mean, essentially, color is something that is surprising.

And that surprise always is discomforting, in fact, you know, because it brings you to places you just don't expect.

When I'm dealing with my painting, I make a drawing, black and white, a grid drawing.

And then I plot the color, in the sense of I map it conceptually.

I use codes to map the color in the drawing.

And then I make the painting.

And so I don't know what it's going to look like.

Because if you have more-- let's say, if you could call it ingredients, like cooking.

If you have 60% blue, and 30% yellow, and then 10% red, you'll have a kind of vibration.

If you have 20% blue, and 40% yellow, and then another, for the red, it's going to create another kind of vibration, another kind of mood or temperament for the space.

Another thing is that colors seen in this scale versus colors seen in this scale is-- and you use the same color, it becomes a different color just because its size is bigger, because it's absorbing more light.

So there're all these kind of physical aspects to color that are conditional, in addition to, say, just what the color is named.

This is the first part of the assignment.

I want you to take a white object, any white object, and place it next to or on top of a second white object.

What I want you to do is to compare the two whites to see how they change.

And if you are able to still call the both objects, the two objects, "white," or, in fact, what will happen, where you're going to have to be more specific to describe what the white becomes.

Then I'd like you to change the lighting in the room.

If you will, maybe change one source or all of it, so that you can still see the objects in the room, but know that you've changed the lighting in the room.

And then I'd like you to then name those same objects to see if you can, in fact, call them what you called them before, and identify how they change from one state-- one light state to the next.

This is a good one.

Isn't it, John?

Yeah, it's very, very good.

So Odili brought up the opening chapter of David Batchelor's book called Cromophobia, titled "White Scapes," in which he explores Western conceptions of white, as it's written about in Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness.

But he begins the book by describing this visit he had to the home of an art collector in Europe in the 90s, where the inside of the house was all white.

He says, "There is a kind of white that is more than white, and this was that kind of white.

There is a kind of white that repels everything that is inferior to it, and that is almost everything.

This was that kind of white.

There is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is bleach.

This was that kind of white.

This was aggressively white."

I also thought about Ta-Nehisi Coates's brilliant book, Between the World and Me, in which he refers to the people who believe themselves to be white.

And this assignment is so instructive and revealing about Odili's work, because what he's doing is not just abstraction for the sake of abstraction.

He's juxtaposing color and form to think about complex social and political issues.

And the real underpinnings of this assignment lie in the teachings of Josef Albers, an artist who taught at Black Mountain College during its heyday in the 1940s, who believed in learning by doing, exactly what our assignment is today-- something that teaches you to see the world differently.

Alber's book Interaction of Color was first published in 1963, and it's still a critical resource for artists and also pretty much anyone else.

Our animation today is going to share with you a few selections from the book's first chapters.

NARRATOR: If one says "red," and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.

And one can be sure that all of these reds will be very different.

Even when a certain color is specified, which all listeners have seen innumerable times, such as the red of the coca-cola signs, which is the same red all over the country, they will still think of many different reds.

Though there are innumerable colors, shades, and tones, in daily vocabulary, there are only about 30 color names.

Our concern is the interaction of color, that is seeing what happens between colors.

We are able to hear a single tone.

But we almost never-- that is, without special devices-- see a single color, unconnected and unrelated to other colors.

Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.

It is this continuous flux that Odita is asking us to acknowledge, explore, and demonstrate for ourselves, at this time and at every moment moving forward.

So here's a demonstration of part 1, taking a sample of white-- say, this sheet of white paper.

First of all, we have to verify that it's white.

You might want to ask someone else to participate with you, to, say, help you to decide together that this is white, that you can both conclude that this is a white sheet of paper.

And then, just simply take this white sheet of paper, and place it against another white.

We have to also, then, declare together, is this white?

And we can say, this is white.

If we're going to agree in that, then we put them together.

And we start to see that there's clearly some kind of difference between this white and that white.

This white, in fact, starts to become blue or gray, versus this white, which is a paper, becomes maybe a touch lavender, a touch of even rosy or pink.

So then we want to test further.

We take this white, the first white, again, and place it against another surface that we might call white-- this surface here.

And we start to see another shift, another change that this table white becomes maybe a yellow, a very rose-- rosy kind of color and that this white, in a way, becomes colder and bluer.

Whereas here it had one condition and state, here it has another.

And then we can take it further on, and start to find other whites that we can find and that we can grab on in the environment.

And we start to see other things happening, where this is now a yellow white.

This is red, rosier, pink white, and this is a blue.

And so the question is, why do we use the word "white" if, in fact, this is now yellow, this is a rosy pink, and this is called "blue."

So then we start to realize that this word, in and of itself, is a construct that, possibly, this was a means of being able to codify a range that we call "white"-- not specifically one object that's uniformly seen as white, but that this term covers a range or wave length.

But again, that is-- I like to say to students, that's an abstracted way, or a generalized way, to call these objects.

[MUSIC PLAYING] The use of color is not limited to a certain type or a certain kind of intensity, but it's really about how one personifies, and personalizes, and experiences space, time, and being through that material, through that energy.

[MUSIC CONTINUES PLAYING]