“Blue is Our Color: Black Memory, Identity and Protest”

Curated by Adetola Abatan and featuring Jite Agbro, Marin Alexis Burnett, Aboubakar Fofana, Brian Lamar and Moses Sun

• Artist Talk: Wednesday, Sept. 28, 4:30-6 p.m., Pigott Auditorium | Guest curator Adetola Abatan in conversation with exhibiting artists, including Jite Agbro and Brian LaMar.
  **This is a great event to bring your classes to or to recommend that your students attend!**

• Closing Reception: Friday, Sept. 30, 5-8 p.m., Hedreen Gallery | A celebration with food and drinks.

• Exhibition Closes: Friday, Oct. 7

More about the exhibit

Blue contains whole worlds in its shades—the twinkle of sapphires, the inky hues of a storm at sea or the spotted simplicity of a robin's egg. Blue is a spectrum, and its variations are a fitting way to hold past, present and future stories of Black people: the joy and jubilee, the pain and protest, the personal and communal. In this exhibit, the “past” is represented by yards of indigo-dyed Àdìrẹ from Nigeria and guinea fowl indigo designs from Mali. These symbols are put in dialogue with contemporary large-scale fabric collages, eye-catching abstractions, and cyanotype photographs of demonstrations against police brutality.

As a visual thread, blue (and by extension, ideas of Blackness and African-ness) is shown to hold much more than stagnant history and simplistic ideas of identity through the contemporary works of Jite Agbro, Marin Alexis Burnett, Aboubakar Fofana, Brian LaMar and Moses Sun.

Blue is Our Color is guest curated by Adetola Abatan who is a collage artist, drummer, engineer and emerging arts leader with deep roots in Nigerian and American culture. Her artwork was featured in the 2021 Seattle Deconstructed Art Fair at Wa Na Wari (where she also completed an artist residency), the After the Quiet: On Black Figures and Folds exhibit at Mini Mart City Park, as well as the Solace and Solitude solo exhibit at the University Unitarian Church. She is a 2022 graduate of the MFA in Arts Leadership program at Seattle University with plans to continue creating and curating stories of Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora.

More Info can be found at Hedreen Gallery.