Magenta Colored Girl

Carrie Mae Weems, artist

born 1953

Magenta Colored Girl, 1989

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: toning; gelatin silver print

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 425 x 1260 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 16 3/4 x 49 5/8 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 17 x 49 3/4 x 1 1/2 in
Weight (Weight): 14 lbs

Credit line: Museum purchase

Accession number: 1993.0031

Not on display

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Label texts

Spencer Museum of Art Highlights

“Magenta Colored Girl” is part of the series “Colored People” that Carrie Mae Weems began in the mid 1980s in reaction to political and cultural movements. Many of those photographed in this series are people Weems knows, including family members. Weems said, “When I was a kid I was called ‘Red Bone.’ That’s what a lot of my family called me. And so that idea about being a red girl as opposed to a caramel-colored girl, or a chocolate-colored girl I thought was really sort of fabulous, in a way of really being very specific about what somebody looked like, what their color reflected, you know?”

Art and Activism: 50 Years of Africana Studies at KU

Carrie Mae Weems’s Magenta Colored Girl was the 2017 KU Common Work of Art to accompany the KU Common Book, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. The photograph and book call into question the arbitrary nature of racial ordering and coloring, of identity and identification. The recognition of skin color as a cultural value aligns Magenta Colored Girl with the pursuits of Citizen, as each demonstrate aspects of racism through form and content.