What’s shade? The reply to that query is usually that it’s subjective. However such vagueness can by some means nonetheless depart intact pale, male, and rancid shade theories of the previous because the default. A gem of a gaggle present, All That Stays on the Sugar Hill Kids’s Museum of Artwork and Storytelling, spotlights artists who subvert modernist orthodoxies and open up new vistas in how we’d relate to paint.
The colour blue is centered in among the works on view by Amanda Martínez, Yiyo Tirado, and Liz Deschenes. It’s neither the melancholy hue of Picasso’s blue interval nor that ethereal shade of the Italian Renaissance. However that’s exactly what makes every of their works so charming — they push blue into different conceptual territories.
Martínez explores Indigenous approaches to rendering water in her sculpture “Working Meditation 1. (Rio Grande)” (2023). Within the Rio Grande-area weaving custom, artists interweave variegated horizontal stripes to evoke rivers. Layering mild blue blocks and stripes to type a fluctuating sample of waves and ripples, the artist invitations viewers into an Indigenous connection to land that she calls “querencia.”
Yiyo Tirado, “Real Estate” (2025) (photograph Daniel Larkin/Hyperallergic)
No matter sacred meanings blue holds, company giants like Microsoft, Chase Financial institution, American Categorical, Dell, HP, IBM, and Visa have flattened it right into a soulless graphic marker of brand name id. Tirado reclaims these hues in his monochromatic blue LED screens modeled on the promoting screens in actual property places of work (“Real Estate,” 2025). In North America, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, unceded Indigenous land and the sky above it within the type of air rights is now a extremely speculative commodity. Because the greed of company actual property traders instigates a widespread inexpensive housing disaster, these clean blue screens allude to the colonization of all out there house as capital.
Deschenes’s dye sublimation print on aluminum, “Indicator #6” (2022), attracts out in any other case simply ignored aspects of blue — as an example, the colour is shinier due to its steel base, leading to a delicate iridescence that’s exhausting to see however provides the blue an understated sheen. Deschenes plucked this specific shade from an surprising, however becoming, supply: the colour swatches that measure humidity in museum areas, usually situated on the again of artworks.
Liz Deschenes, “Indicator #6” (2022) (photograph by Timothy Lee Images, courtesy Sugar Hill Kids’s Museum of Artwork and Storytelling)
Like Deschenes, Leslie Hewitt and Lucia Koch use photographic processes to seize colours in ways in which portray can’t. Koch’s “Polenta” (2025) takes us within a cardboard field by which a cut-out “window” appears to be like out onto some foliage. Daylight filters in, bringing delicate heat and light to some areas of the composition whereas leaving others within the shadows, creating a way of dynamism.
In Hewitt’s “Subfield (Extension) (Tension)” (2024), a geometrical association of monochromatic chromogenic prints probes how shade is relational: The brown and rose tones within the work will seem totally different to the attention when they’re adjoining to the inexperienced and grey expanses of shade than in the event that they had been solely surrounded by the gallery’s white partitions.
Lucia Koch, “Polenta” (2025) (photograph by Timothy Lee Images, courtesy Sugar Hill Kids’s Museum of Artwork and Storytelling)
Whereas most artists on this present adhere to a monochromatic or restricted palette, colours dance with pizazz in Kevin Umaña’s blended media works. His geometric compositions honor the aesthetics of the Indigenous Pipil folks in El Salvador who endured a devastating genocide within the Nineteen Thirties by the hands of dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Umaña refers to his works as visible puzzles. Conceptually, the puzzle evokes the complexity of coming to phrases with the genocide’s legacy, whereas aesthetically it refers back to the zigzagging varieties in conventional Pipil artwork that signify rivers and snakes, in addition to its kaleidoscopic colours.
This exhibition probes Indigenous, non-White methods of seeing shade, in addition to how photographic methods can obtain colours that portray can’t. Whereas it’s simple to assert that the whole lot has been achieved earlier than, this exhibition is proof that unexplored vistas for shade await these keen to journey off the crushed path.
Kevin Umaña, “Like a Shadow, With out Weight, Useless in Advance, 2024 (photograph Daniel Larkin/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of All That Stays on the Sugar Hill Museum of Artwork & Storytelling (photograph by Timothy Lee Images, courtesy Sugar Hill Kids’s Museum of Artwork and Storytelling)
Set up view of All That Stays on the Sugar Hill Museum of Artwork & Storytelling (photograph by Timothy Lee Images, courtesy Sugar Hill Kids’s Museum of Artwork and Storytelling)
All That Stays continues on the Sugar Hill Museum of Artwork & Storytelling (898 St. Nicholas Avenue, Sugar Hill, Manhattan) by Might 25. The exhibition was curated by C.J. Chueca and Omar López-Chahoud.
