Transcription
In 1963, there is a book published by an artist and author named Joseph Albers called "The Interaction of Color." Albers was an artist, a printmaker, a painter, and an educator in the 50s, 60s, and 70s who really changed the way that visual arts think about color as a field of study. He famously taught a color theory at the Yale School of Art, where he used his students' experiments and processes and collages and prints to learn about color.
When Albers was thinking about color, he didn't use color in a way that a lot of artists traditionally used in the past. He didn't use it to make images necessarily. He didn't use it for representation. He simply used his work to think about color as the subject in and of itself. He would use color in relation to it with other color to sort of see what kind of possibilities he could come up with. He would use color to create transparency. He would use color to create movement. In the case of this image, it's hard to tell on a projector screen, the orange square in the middle, the small orange squares are the same color. So he would use color to trick our eyes to see two different colors, or to take two different colors and make them seem like one color. And his entire life, his entire practice was about this slow, methodical experimentation, looking for new possibilities in the way color interacts with other colors in the world around it.
When I graduated from high school in 2005, actually from this high school, I was every parent's dream. I went to art school. After several years in art school, um, I decided to like go to more art school, so that's what I did. So I went to graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and studied things like this, studied visual arts. During my time, throughout all of these years of art school, all the things that I did and didn't learn, one of the things I think was really important is the ability and skill of looking closer at the world around us. This is something that I think every visual artist should be in tune to, and it's maybe one of the most important skills across visual arts, whether you're a dancer, a performer, a painter, a singer, a performance artist. The ability to take the world and look at it in new ways and closer and more aware than other people around you.
This is something that I used in my own teaching. I taught, actually, I taught color theory at Ohio State for a few years, and this was a skill that I used in color theory class. This is a skill I used in drawing, for instance, a drawing drawing class. We think of drawing as something that's all hand-based, but in reality, drawing is more about looking. It's more about looking and observing at something that really is about your hand. And this skill, this this idea of looking at the world closer than most people, or observing more with more awareness, is something I still use today in my current position here at the high school. Whenever students, part of my job is, we students have all these problems, right? We have all these things that we have to figure out how to do or make or build or create. And my job as their facilitator, as their teacher, is to look at new possibilities. What new material? What new technique? What new way of looking at something can we use to find the possibility that we're looking for?
My own personal interaction with color changed in about 2014. In 2014, about eight years ago, my wife and I began the process of adopting two young boys from northern Ohio. They were nine and they were six at the time, and they were black, and they were from the northern part of Ohio. And they moved with us within, moved in with us fairly abruptly in 2014. Within the first few weeks of moving in, my entire family, my parents, my wife, our children, my brother and his wife, we all had to take a trip to Washington D.C. to attend my grandfather's funeral at Arlington Cemetery.
Now, when you think of cities in relation to color, D.C. is not one that necessarily resonates quickly. I don't think when I think of color in cities, I think of maybe New York City, I think of Vegas, I think of Tokyo, these cities that have this gigantic contrast between neon lights in the darkness, the sky, and the grittiness of the streets and the reflective nature of all the buildings. But D.C. has a very particular and different color profile. The Mall of D.C. in the summer is this insane field of colors. The bottom half of that field is the grass, and the grass is so unbelievably green. Like, we think in Marysville, Ohio, we have green grass. That is not the green of this grass. The green of the Mall is so green that it's, it's almost like more green than it is grass. Above that field, you have the D.C. sky, which in the summer is this intense, intense cerulean blue that burns when you are walking underneath of it. And sort of the line between that green and the blue, you have all these these like white and marble gray monuments that are breaking up this perfect horizon of the space. And these monuments are celebrating the people who came before us, the stories of our country on the Mall of D.C. And as you traverse across the Mall, below the horizon of the green line, you see this darkness happen, and you see this black line abruptly breaking the space between the sky and the ground. And as you approach this black line, it's the Vietnam Memorial, which was designed by Maya Lin. And as you walk up to this memorial, you literally walk down a hill, you walk down underground to the place where bodies are lying, and you are surrounded by this black, dark, reflective surface, and you see your own face and your family's faces reflected in the names of the people who died during the Vietnam conflict.
During this trip, my wife, my family, and I had the privilege of touring the White House. So here we are, my wife and I, our two new children, my parents, my brother, his wife, sitting, waiting for hours in that burning blue heat of the D.C. sky, waiting to enter the House of White, the White House. As we enter the White House, along with a gigantic line of people, we're, if you've ever been to the White House, you might know the White House is themed chromatically with colors. So there's the Gold Room, there's a Red Room, there's a Green Room, there's a Blue Room, and these rooms are lavishly decorated in monochromatic schemes that have stayed the same for a very long time. And in these rooms, huge parties, huge decisions, really important things have happened in the history of our country. So we have the White House, we have a blue, blue room, a red room, a green room, etc., the Yellow Room. And one hallway, I think, is the Rose Garden. As you walk through the White House, you see images of all of the residents who have lived in that space going back through history. So all the presidents, you see Kennedy, and you see the Bushes, and you see FDR, et cetera, et cetera, sorry, going chronologically. And then you see the Clintons, and then all of a sudden, you see the the current residents of that space, which at the time was the Obama family.
So here I am, this like overly analytical ex-art student who thinks about color in a way that is really not practical in the real world. For instance, like when I get dressed in the morning, I don't necessarily consider the interaction of my pants with my shirt on the way Joseph Albers might. Um, but here I am in the house that we call White, with the Red Room and the Green Room and the Blue Room and the Gold Room, looking at these images of the white family, and the white family, and a white family, and a white family, and a white family, and then abruptly, a black family. Here I am as a white person with my white parents and my white wife and my black kids.
Once we left the White House, we once again were blasted by the heat of that Mall. And when you cross the Mall, you come across the Reflecting Pool, this mirror-like surface that's reflecting this massive white heat from the sky. The same pool that decades ago, a black man stood at the front of and talked about his dreams, surrounded by hundreds and thousands of black and white bodies.
After this trip, we all came home and life went back to normal. We started a chaotic process of learning, the lifelong journey of learning how to be parents. My wife and I, at the age of 27. Um, stories like this, I think probably happen more often than we think. And for a long time, I've thought about the story in my life, which was eight years ago, and I'm always trying to think about why is this, why is this coming up? Right? Why is this a story that I've talked about? Why is this something that I think about? Why is this a thing that I'm devoting this time to speak about? And I think when we hear stories, we have a tendency to want to walk away from that story with some kind of like moral code, right? Some sort of lesson or solution or answer to some problem. Learn the story, and then you'll do better at this thing in your life later on. And I think that that's a pretty simplistic way to look at some extremely complex stories like this one that I've been dealing with in my life.
I think that these kind of stories aren't necessarily about finding a single solution or a single answer or a single thing that fixes this thing in your life. These stories are this multitude of possibility, this multitude of observation and experience that can lead to a different experience, that leads to a different observation, that leads to a different experience that then could lead to you teaching at your high school that you graduated from and giving a TED Talk, potentially, right? So these kinds of events are really complicated. And I think that Joseph Albers was considering similar things when he was working with his very simple colors in the 1960s.
This is an image I came across when I was thinking about this talk. This is actually a few Albers paintings hanging in the White House during the Obama administration, just happenstance with the story. But I think Albers was similar to the way I look at a story like this. He wasn't finding answers. He wasn't saying, this plus this equals this. What he was saying is, there is a multitude of possibility. There is a multitude of answers, a multitude of experience that are worth living through. And if you look really closely at the world around you, you will be fulfilled and enriched by a huge amount of possibility and experience. Thank you.