3.01.

2015 Color Theory | Issue 20 | n+1

Essays

JEFF CHANG

Color Theory
Race trouble in the avant-garde

Published in: Issue 20: Survival

Publication date: Fall 2014

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/essays/color-theory/ 1/4
3.01.2015 Color Theory | Issue 20 | n+1

Olia Mishchenko, untitled, from Remote University (detail). 2011, pen and ink on

paper. 44 120". Courtesy of the artist.

In February 1979, the downtown New York gallery Artists Space opened
an exhibition featuring a group of young white postmodern artists.
Among them was a 23-year-old who chose to use only his rst name,

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/essays/color-theory/ 2/4
3.01.2015 Color Theory | Issue 20 | n+1

Donaldas if, like generations of self-mythologizing young urban

newcomers before him and since, he might rush into his American future
by casting away his past.

His surname was Newman and he had come to the sooty punk streets of
lower Manhattan from the freshly sodded suburban tracts of Southern
California. He had been studying at the California Institute of the Arts, a
short freeway ride from his family home, where the eucalyptus trees
were still taking root in the Valencia soil and teachers like John
Baldessari were still overturning received wisdom. Very quickly, Newman
was accepted into the prestigious independent study program at the
Whitney Museum in New York.

Donald was like a rocket launched at two. He arrived at Penn Station and
headed straight to the front desk at Artists Space, where he name-
dropped Baldessari and CalArts and asked, Do you have any place for
me? I was told you would take care of me. That rst night, he slept on
the oor of the gallery.

He had arrived downtown at a splendid time. In the city, venues for

young artists such as the Kitchen, PS1, Franklin Furnace, and White
Columns were springing up. Artists Space was a special nexus of fresh
energies. When the nonprot alternative space opened in 1973 on the
northern fringe of SoHo with funding from the New York State Council
on the Arts, its mission was to allow artists of a new generation to
introduce their unknown, unrepresented peers to the world. It would be
streetwise, egalitarian; singular in the ood of new galleries, workshops,
community centers, artist collectives, and museums surging against an
art world, cofounder Trudy Grace said, locked up and controlled by
critics, curators, and dealers.

Outside the galleries, Donald could hear the rst screams of the new in
bars, clubs, and galleries from the Bowery through SoHo across to
Tribeca. The rst punksas they came to call themselvesintended to
defy all the gestures and conceits of the old countercultures. They were
opposed to everything, even opposition. Mass movements are so un-hip,

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/essays/color-theory/ 3/4
3.01.2015 Color Theory | Issue 20 | n+1

said Legs McNeil, a cofounder of Punk magazine. Liberation movements

were, he said, the beginning of political correctness, which was just
fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

Excerpted from Who We Be, reprinted with permission of St. Martins Press.

Unlock ten years of n+1.

It only takes 5 minutes to subscribe.

Subscribe online and gain access to the

entire archive.

Subscribe

Or sign in and read it now.

email

password

Sign In

Forgot Password

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/essays/color-theory/ 4/4