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Museum of Color
From ochre to lapis lazuli, Stephanie Krzywonos opens a door into the entangled histories of our most iconic pigments, revealing how colors hold stories of both lightness and darkness.
In addition to ochre, paleolithic artists thirty thousand years ago in modern-day Spain and France used cinnabar, a mineral linked to fresh volcanic activity and hot springs, as bright red pigment in cave paintings. To make cochineal pigment, brush plump, wingless females that have just made a waxy cocoon into bags and kill them by immersion in scalding water; exposure to steam, sunlight, or the heat of an oven; or rolling them on a wooden board without popping. In the United States, Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy man from Congo was displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, moved to a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and later housed in a cage with monkeys at the Bronx Zoo until enough people protested.
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