McColl Center is committed to advancing artistic practice by providing time and space to artists to explore ideas and materials. We encourage artists to take risks in their processes so that they may grow with their work. To bring this aspect of our mission forward, McColl Center this fall will transform its first-floor gallery into an open project space, where the exploratory and ever-shifting nature of creativity will be on display. In this space, inquiry and investigation will take priority over finished objects and products.
One of the fall 2017 artists-in-residence, the San Francisco–based, artist-baker Leah Rosenberg, inaugurates this new program with her project, Color for the People, a site-specific exploration of color and taste. Rosenberg’s process begins with a daily routine of observing colors outdoors and capturing them with her smartphone camera. Each week, she will select a color from Charlotte’s landscape and apply it to the gallery walls and furniture to create an immersive color-field painting and meditative space. To deepen visitors’ sensory engagement with her project, Rosenberg will host a series of Color Bar events over the course of her residency: On selected Thursday evenings, she will serve cocktails and treats to match the color of the week, encouraging the public to reflect on the relationships between experiences of color, flavor, and people.
Amid growing social tensions and extreme xenophobia, Color for the People intends to create space for remembering the vital roles that art and food continue to play in fostering shared experiences of pleasure and joy, which are, as the artist says, “medicine for times like these.”
Color Bar is made possible, in part, by the generous support of students in the Culinary Arts and Baking & Pastry Arts programs at Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC).
Image: Leah Rosenberg: Color for the People at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, December 2017.