Colour Literacy Forum #10: The Cultural Palette: Colour’s Role in Identity, Gender and Society

The Colour Literacy Forum is an international, collaborative effort to align university-level colour education with current design needs in the culture. The goal of the Forum is to connect faculty, students, and administrators with interdisciplinary professionals to provide cutting-edge research, curricula, tools, and resources.

The Colour Literacy Forum is a virtual gathering featuring presentations and discussions related to updating and expanding colour education in art and design programs at the university level. The forum convenes for three events per year to share information and offer dynamic networking opportunities for participants.

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Lives in colour: Pioneering women in colour history

We associate many milestones in colour history with men, for example Isaac Newton, George Field, Goethe, Chevreul, Itten, Kandinsky and many others. Examples of women writing about colour are rare before the 20th century. In this talk Alexandra Loske will introduce three women who wrote and published on colour and colour theory in the 19th and early 20th century and investigate what motivated them and how they claimed their place in the colour canon: English flower painter Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819), multi-cultural poet, actress and inventor Beatrice Irwin (1877-1956) and German artist and lecturer Carry van Biema (1881-1942), whose life and work were brutally extinguished by the Nazis during WW2.

The Speaker

Dr. Alexandra Loske is a British-German art historian, writer, and museum curator with a particular interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European art and architecture. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the use of colour in the Royal Pavilion, a Georgian former royal residence in Brighton, East Sussex, where she is now curator. Alexandra has lectured and been published widely on the subject of colour. Her first book was Colour – A Visual History (Tate/ Smithsonian Institute, 2019). She is the editor of a volume on colour in the 19th century for The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Color. Her most recent publications are Mary Gartside: Abstract Visions of Colour (Paul Holberton, 2024), the substantial double-volume The Book of Colour Concepts (TASCHEN, 2024), and The Artist’s Palette (Thames & Hudson/Princeton University Press). In 2014 she curated the exhibition Regency Colour and Beyond 1785 – 1845 at the Royal Pavilion, and contributed to the exhibition Turner et la Couleur in Aix en-Provence and the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Her research into women in colour history is supported by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex, where she holds a Research Associate post. Currently, she is writing a book about the Royal Pavilion for Yale University Press and preparing a new exhibition on colour for the Royal Pavilion

Blue jeans: an exercise in contrast

Few clothing items are as ubiquitous as blue jeans, yet their simplicity is deceptive. For some, indigo blue might be the colour of freedom, but for workers who have produced the dye, it has often been a colour of oppression and tyranny. Levi Strauss made blue jeans in the 1870s to withstand the hard work of mining, but denim has since become the epitome of leisure. In the 1950s, celebrities like Marlon Brando transformed the utilitarian clothing of industrial labour into a glamorous statement of youthful rebellion, and now, you can find jeans on chic fashion runways. While the term “blue jeans” indicates a colourful essence, jeans have become so commonplace that most people don’t even register them as blue. Masculine and feminine; sexy and slouchy; durable and disposable—blue jeans are nothing if not an exercise in opposites. In this talk, Carolyn will consider the versatility of this iconic garment and investigate what makes denim a universal signifier, ready to fit any context, meaning, and body. She will also discuss why, when it comes to jeans, what was once the world’s most coveted colour has become practically invisible. Although blue jeans have been historically defined (at least in part) by their hue, the way consumers perceive denim’s colour has never been far from context.

The Speaker

Carolyn Purnell is a historian, writer, and lover of all things colourful. She is the author of Blue Jeans (2023) and The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses (2017). Carolyn earned her Ph.D. in history from University of Chicago, and her work has appeared in publications including Psychology Today, Wall Street Journal, CityLab by The Atlantic, and Apartment Therapy. Her research has received recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, European Commission, Huntington Library, Georges Lurcy Foundation, Brown Foundation of Fellows, and French Society for Historical Studies. Most recently, Carolyn wrote and produced “Pasture Prime,” a short film that premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

“It’s a girl!” What pink reveals about colour, gender and childhood in the 20th and 21st century

A growing number of expectant millennials decide to throw a gender reveal party by cutting open a cake to reveal either pink or blue filling, releasing pink or blue balloons or by staging a spectacular, at times deadly, pink, or blue explosion. But what exactly does pink and blue “reveal”?. An increasingly anticipatory and nostalgic, scientific, and sensory, commodified and community-sharing mode of affirming the gender binary. While all senses are implicated in affirming the gender of the not-yet-child during pregnancy, seeing either pink or blue has become particularly salient in establishing the “visual truth” of two and only two genders in the 21st century. Along with commodified prenatal gender testing, pink or blue baby showers, “gender-appropriate” nursery designs, colour coded toys, and pink or blue birth-announcements, all exhaustively documented on Instagram, gender reveal parties contribute to stereotyping, dramatizing, and celebrating “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” – in a rapidly changing landscape of gender identity. Indeed, it strikes the author as tantamount to articulate the celebration of the pink and blue binary in pregnancy and early childhood with the increasing visibility of gender nonconforming identities. Dominique will thus home in on the LGBTQ+ communities’ ambivalent relationship to Barbie, arguably the most stereotypically pink toy there is. Since her birth in 1959, Barbie has played a central role in LGBTQ+ coming-out narratives, culminating with the 2023 Barbie film and its excessively pink aesthetic. This goes to show that (the meaning of) colour or gender cannot be contained. For one thing, has Barbie always been pink? Has pink always been a girl’s colour?

The Speaker

Dr. Dominique Grisard (she/her) teaches gender studies at the University of Basel and heads the Swiss Center for Social Research (CSR). She is currently doing research on visual arts institutions while developing a “Gender and diversity monitoring in the Swiss cultural sector”, a research cooperation between CSR and Pro Helvetia at the University of Bern. Long-standing research interests are the gender history of color, most notably pink, childhood, consumption and popular culture, visual arts, femininity, whiteness, sexuality, intimacy, prisons and terrorism. Grisard is the author of Gendering Terror (Campus, 2011) and co-editor of five anthologies in gender studies, among them “Violent Times. Intersectional Gender Perspectives” (Seismo, 2022) and the forthcoming “The Life of Beauty” (Seismo, 2025). In addition, Grisard has published widely on the color pink.