What is the color of a memory? Of history? The American sculptor Anne Truitt is wellÌýknown for the nuanced colors of herÌýworks. Beginning in the early 1960s, Truitt honed her sense of color in concert with a unique understanding of and relationship to ³Ù³ó±ðÌýintrusion of personal and historical memory on present experience. Many of her colleagues were at the same time working with color in its specific application to modernist painting, but Truitt was different. By appealing to the beholder51²è¹Ý¶ù experience of her work—largely through the sumptuousness of a colorful surface—Truitt was leaving behind certain exhausted tenets of American modernism and in the process became a pioneer of a new 51²è¹Ý¶ù: Minimalism.
Miguel de Baca is currentlyÌýthe Terra Foundation 51²è¹Ý¶ùing Professor of American Art in 2017-18 at ³Ù³ó±ðÌýHistory of Art Department at the University of Oxford. He is visitingÌýfrom Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History. He studies modern and contemporary American Art, andÌýis especially interested in issues of memory-making and the representation of history as they intersect the history of abstraction. Among his other interests are video and digital art, culture jamming, protest, artistic collaborations, and critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Miguel51²è¹Ý¶ù monograph,Ìý, for which he received a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. His current book project,ÌýVideo Art and Public Culture,Ìýis about activist uses of video and digital art from the 1960s forward.