What color is divine light?
The Textile Museum
701 21st St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20052
Museum Hours:
Tuesday thru Saturday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
February 4 - July 1, 2023
Contemporary artist Anne Lindberg’s immersive installation transforms light and thread into a site for contemplation and reflection on connections with ourselves, communities and individual conceptions of the divine. A series of programs within the gallery will bring community members together for shared experiences designed to foster understanding and transcendence.
Across many religions, light is used as a symbol of divine presence on Earth. Inspired by an eponymous 1971 essay, Anne Lindberg is transforming the museum’s third-floor gallery into a site-specific installation that will explore the question, “What color is divine light?”
Scientists have determined that between complementary colors exist colors the eye and brain cannot perceive, called “impossible” colors. “It’s the intangible, the imaginary, the mysterious, unnamed space between… although our eyes/brains can’t actually see the colors between, we feel them, we sense them,” states Lindberg. “The divine, like these colors, is unnamable, untouchable, intangible.”
Set against lavender walls, what color is divine light? will contain thousands of fine chromatic threads in complementary yellow and blue colors – creating a cloud of color that evokes light itself. Lindberg’s installation invites visitors to gather and reflect: If divinity could be experienced as a physical presence, what might it look like? Sound like? Feel like? What color is divine light?
Anne Lindberg: what color is divine light? is accompanied by a gallery guide.
About the Artist
Anne Lindberg (American, b. 1962) is a multimedia artist whose work centers on immersive installations and drawings that tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space, provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual responses. Lindberg is the recipient of multiple awards, fellowships and grants, including a Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections across the United States. Lindberg received a B.F.A. from Miami University and a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Acknowledgements
Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by the Fund for Contemporary Textile Art, the Cynthia and Alton Boyer Fund for Education, the Estate of Jack Lenor Larson and the Contemporary Textiles Endowment.