OF COLOUR

Non-fiction / Art / Visual / Hybrid. Essay Press, 2020. Paperback, 224 pages. 8"x6"x0.46"

From the press: of colour is an experimental essay about color, hybridity, and art-making. It is a memoir of Agyemaa Agard’s coming to North America and encountering binaries of black and white within global anti-blackness. It is a manifesto for an experience of color that embraces change: the prismatic, the perverse, and that which is wholly beyond categorization.

“One way to express the experience of the racialized body in America is to consider the notion that color is enacted on the body and expressed through it. We witness this in Agyemaa Agard’s text not through explication and summary but through the form of the text itself, its multiplicities and refusals.

This is a text about the act of making, about exposing seams, ruptures, and refusals… The profusion of poetic, colorful, intimate, and critical texts, and the rich images and photographs that follow this refusal enact a kind of exuberance in the face of lack. Refusal within this work provokes invention. Denial, contradiction, foreclosure becomes essential to the evolution of the work itself. This text enacts its own kind of writing itself into knowing and being. As if we are witnessing a growing literacy of the self, in all its surfaces, contradictions, and complexities. Agyemaa Agard says, ‘I am perpetually learning how to read,’ and by immersing ourselves in her intricate, lavish text, we are learning, too.” — MARY-KIM ARNOLD