The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B Du Bois
- When 16 Jan - 6 Mar 2021
- Where
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Address
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021
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Hours
TUES TO SAT, 10AM–5PM
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Phone
+61 2 8936 0888
‘The Colour Line’ brings together a presentation of new and recent works by Kamilaroi/Brisbane artist Archie Moore in dialogue with infographics by African American scholar and activist W.E.B Du Bois (1868–1963).
Archie Moore’s ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity—skin, language, smell, home, flags—as well as the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding, including the broader concerns of racism. For this project, Moore reflects on ideas of empirical evidence from the perspective of Indigenous Australia. Moore's new commission, ‘Graph of Perennial Disadvantage’ 2020, begins by revisiting The Australian Constitution of 1901 that stated that Aboriginal people were to be no part of statistical information. Alongside this new work, Moore recreates and updates his ‘Family Tree’ 2018 wall drawing, a sprawling chalkboard style genealogy that complicates historical diagrams drawn up by anthropologists. The photographic series ‘Blood Fraction’ 2015 is also presented, exploring the politics of skin and the words used to classify, quantify and assign meaning based on race.
For the American section of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Du Bois led the creation of over 60 hand-drawn charts, maps and infographics, visualising data on the economic and social progress of African Americans since Emancipation. These extraordinary examples of 19th-century data visualisation are at once a social study of populations in Georgia and throughout the United States and a pioneering model of reimagining data as a form of resistance and protest.
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Curator: José Da Silva
Presented in association with Sydney Festival and with the support of the UNSW Galleries Commissioners Circle.
UNSW Galleries is proud to be working with Sydney Festival to reconnect and reinvigorate Australia’s visual arts with its Australian Made program. Visit www.sydneyfestival.org.au to explore the program.
Banner: Archie Moore, ‘Family Tree’ (detail) 2018. Conté crayon on blackboard paint. Installation view: Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. Image courtesy: the artist and The Commercial, Sydney. Photograph: Carl Warner
Tile: Archie Moore, ‘Venn diagram’ 2018. Conté crayon on blackboard paint. Image courtesy: the artist and The Commercial, Sydney. Photograph: Carl Warner