The term "blue black" is often used to describe very dark skin, a common characteristic of people of African descent. This term and the colors it evokes carry deep cultural and historical significance, particularly within the African American community. This article delves into the multifaceted meanings of "blue black," exploring its representation in art, its connection to identity, and the challenges of afrophobia.
The Pulitzer Arts Foundation hosted an exhibition titled "Blue Black," curated by artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition explores the space between Ellsworth Kelly’s "Blue Black" and Louis Armstrong’s "Black and Blue," using them as bookends for an inquiry into how these two colors have been employed within a wide range of artistic practices.
It set the tone and mood for the entire exhibition within, which was described by its curator, Okwui Enwezor, as a “project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists to the current state of things.” Situated here at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation adjacent to Kelly’s Blue Black, A Small Band is meant to signal that it is part of a conversation on the “current state of things,” a conversation that began between Ellsworth Kelly, Louis Armstrong, and me, and that continues between the almost seventy works assembled.
Afrophobia and Representation
Akuol Garang de Mabior, a South Sudanese filmmaker, tackles afrophobia through her work. She believes that the perspectives of African women are undervalued and aims to create stories for the screen that reach African audiences and encourage a renewed way of seeing African identities and futures.
In her digital collage "Blue Black" (2020), Akuol uses her work to rise up against the devastating effects of what she refers to as 'afrophobia.' Akuol prefers to use different terminology: "I prefer “afrophobia”, which is the active distancing from the perceived wretchedness of the deep, dark, middle of Africa - where I'm from".
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Speaking about this devastating and dangerous stereotyping, Akuol explains: 'Blue-black is a term used to describe very dark skin - a common characteristic of South Sudanese people. As a dark-skinned black African person, I cannot deny, hide from, put on or take off my Africanness. I had to confront the negative ways the world sees Africa.' Akuol shows that a powerful way of overcoming violent stereotypes is through representation itself 'Making, watching and engaging with films has been my way of grappling with afrophobia. I loved seeing very dark-skinned black people on the screen in films by Djibril Diop Mambety and Ousmane Sembene.
The Color Blue: A Symbol of Hope and Melancholy
Hidden Black History The US Government Tried To Erase
Scholar and author Imani Perry explores blue as a symbol of both hope and melancholy throughout Black history in her book, "Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People".
"There was something about the universality of the color blue and ... the way in which those two senses of blue coincided so profoundly that actually, for me, became a pathway to thinking about Blackness," Perry says. Perry says it's no coincidence that King wore blue on her wedding day, and that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer wore a blue dress to testify before Congress in 1964.
"When I see the repetition of the blue, and particularly the repetition among Black women of the South, I think of it as a color that certainly had a kind of grace and elegance," she says. "It's pretty, but it has a seriousness to it. Blue is also the color of the slave trade: Dyed indigo cloths in West Africa were traded for human life in the 16th century.
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But it's also a color that Perry associates with hope, especially when she imagines blue sky and sea visible to enslaved people as they were brought to America during the middle passage. "I fail but try to grasp what it was to be snatched from everything you knew, to be thrown into the hull of a ship in unbelievably horrifying conditions, chained together, sometimes chained to people who were dead," she says.
Blue Notes and Cultural Identity
On the "blue note" in jazz It's the in-between. It's the slurred note ... that which isn't recognized on the Western scale. … Increasingly musicians have been talking about a blues scale … and that's actually just a wonderful example because the addition of the blue note to the sound of American music transforms it much in the way that there's something indispensable about the presence of Black people in the United States and in what it becomes.
And at the same time, it is its own thing. And also it has connections to these other genres of music. It's a beautiful example for me of actually the combination of African Americans being American, becoming a people in the context of the United States, and also having these connections that are like arteries to the rest of the Black world. The music, it's not just metaphorical.
Part of the reason it started to feel like more than a coincidence to me was actually encountering a letter written by a fabric trader in the 18th century in reference to a planter who was purchasing cloth for the people enslaved on his plantation to make clothing. And the fabric trader mentioned that the planter said that he had to bring back blue cloth otherwise the women, the Black women who were enslaved, wouldn't want it.
There's something extraordinary about these women who were enslaved insisting upon a particular color for adornment. ... These scenes in the historical record of people being exchanged for a block of indigo were heartbreaking to me. People who were artisans ... who had been adorned in indigo now seeing their worth measured in dye. ... slavery, and particularly South Carolina, having read about Eliza Pinckney, who was known as the person who sort of brought indigo to the States and a very young, precocious white woman plantation owner, and realizing that she struggled with the cultivation of indigo until an unnamed Black person was brought to teach her how to cultivate it.
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And that the realization that that is part actually of the … creation of race, is that this person, who actually was the educator, would not be credited for allowing this trade to flourish in the United States. And also at the same time, other Black people's lives would be made really unbearable by virtue of the success of this trade. Indigo is very hard to cultivate. It stinks. It makes you sick. There's flies. There's vermin. It's one of these really hard things to make.
Artistic Representations of "Blue Black"
The "Blue Black" exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation showcases various artistic interpretations of the theme. The works are roughly organized around three combinations of the words “blue” and “black.”
- "blue black": References the Ellsworth Kelly sculpture, employing the colors as discrete visual elements.
- "blueblack": Gathers works in which the colors are used in ways that visually blur the boundary between them.
- "blue-black": Uses portraiture to explore the connection between blue and black as colors, on the one hand, and blackness as an identity on the other.
Carrie Mae Weems' "Blue Black Boy" (1997) tones a photograph of a young black boy a deep blue, playing with the connection between blackness, color, and language. In Kerry James Marshall’s "Untitled (policeman)" (2015), blackness as racial category and color converge in Marshall’s use of bone, ivory, mars, carbon, and other shades of black to give dimensionality, depth, nuance, and complexity to the rendering of black bodies, while blue is reserved in the painting for parts of the policeman’s uniform, patrol car, and the night sky.
Table: Key Artists and Works in the "Blue Black" Exhibition
| Artist | Work | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Ellsworth Kelly | Blue Black (2000) | A twenty-eight-foot-tall painted aluminum wall sculpture. |
| Carrie Mae Weems | Blue Black Boy (1997) | A photograph of a young black boy toned a deep blue. |
| Kerry James Marshall | Untitled (policeman) (2015) | A painting where blackness as racial category and color converge. |
| Lynette Yiadom-Boakye | Messages from Elsewhere (2013) | Oil of a black female figure wearing a lapis lazuli dress, gazing over her shoulder, lost in contemplation. |
| Viviane Sassen | Kinee (2011) | An abstracted image of the Senegalese model, Kinee Diouf, in a field of sky blue. |
| Glenn Ligon | Untitled (I Am Not Tragically Colored) (1990) | A painting of mine where a text by the author Zora Neale Hurston is repeatedly stenciled in bluish-black oil stick down the length of a door-shaped panel, also uses language to figure the body. |
The exhibition includes Ligon’s text painting, “Untitled (I Am Not Tragically Colored)” (1990). It’s a work in which the artist appropriates the line, “I am not tragically colored,” from Zora Neale Hurston’s celebrated 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” and stencils it in bluish-black oil repeatedly on a wooden door. With each impression, the phrase gets messier, less visible, and broken into pieces: “I am not,” and single words, “colored,” alluding to the intertextuality and mutability of language.
