Destiny S. Palmer
My work lies at the intersection of abstraction, history, materials, and color. I hope to blur the lines of narrative and formalism. Labored Bodies is a body of work that investigates colonial American History as it relates to my own identity as a black woman. This series of works that use certain materials to allude to specific historical and sociopolitical contexts, like the Transatlantic Slave Trade, through cotton duck and trade maps, the labor of the working class in America through the use of vintage textiles, and the history of painting through re-contextualization of the canvas and frame. My drawing and paintings explore automatic drawing, asemic and semic through gestural marks and structures, while the fabric works rely on materials to navigate conceptual ideas related to labor, textile history and the body. Symbols like hands, cotton, and map markers allow the work to move around landscape and figuration.
Labored Bodies Chapter 1.
Below you will find various images that have guided my continued research. I don't own the rights to any of the imagese below.
Works Cited (Color)
Albers, Anni. Anni Albers: Camino Real. David Zwirner Books, 2020.
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. Yale University Press, 2013.
Ball, Philip. Bright Earth. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Birren, Faber. Color Psychology and Color Therapy. 2024.
Clair, Kassia St. The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History. Liveright Publishing, 2019.
Clair, Kassia St. The Secret Lives of Colour. John Murray, 2018.
Coles, David. Chromatopia. National Geographic Books, 2021.
---. Chromatopia. National Geographic Books, 2021.
Delamare, François, and Bernard Guineau. Discoveries: Colors. 2000.
DeSalle, Rob, and Hans Bachor. A Natural History of Color. Pegasus Books, 2020.
Eastaugh, Nicholas, et al. Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary of Historical Pigments. Routledge, 2007.
Evans, Gavin. The Story of Colour. Michael O’Mara Books, 2017.
Finlay, Victoria. Color. Random House, 2007.
---. The Brilliant History of Color in Art. Getty Publications, 2014.
Fox, James. The World According to Color. St. Martin’s Press, 2022.
Gage, John. Color and Meaning. Univ of California Press, 1999.
Gettens, Rutherford John, and George Leslie Stout. Painting Materials. Courier Corporation, 1966.
Goldman, Rachael. Essays in Global Color History. 2016.
Hackney, Stephen. On Canvas. Getty Publications, 2020.
Itten, Johannes. The Elements of Color. John Wiley & Sons, 1970.
---. The Elements of Color. John Wiley & Sons, 1970.
Loske, Alexandra. A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
---. Color. Smithsonian Institution, 2019.
Parkinson, Neil. The History of Color. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2023.
---. The History of Colour. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2023.
Pastoureau, Michel. Blue. 2001.
---. Green. Princeton University Press, 2014.
---. Red. Princeton University Press, 2023.
---. Yellow. Princeton University Press, 2023.
Phipps, Elena, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (New. Cochineal Red. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010.
Syme, Patrick, and Abraham Gottlob Werner. Werner’s Nomenclature Of Colours, With Additions By P. Syme. Legare Street Press, 2023.
Varichon, Anne. Color Charts. Princeton University Press, 2024.
Works Cited(American History)
Allen, James. Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.
“An Account of Two Voyages to New-England : Made during the Years 1638, 1663 : Josselyn, John, Fl. 1630-1675 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” Internet Archive, Boston : W. Veazie, 1865, https://archive.org/details/accountoftwovoya00joss/page/26/mode/2up?view=theater.
Anderson, William C., and Zoé Samudzi. As Black as Resistance. AK Press, 2018.
Baraka, Amiri. S O S. Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, 2015.
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision. Stanford University Press, 2005.
Bois, W. E. B. Du. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Canedy, Dana, et al. Unseen. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2017.
Cary, Lorene. The Price of a Child. National Geographic Books, 1996.
Cherlise, Renata. Black Archives. Ten Speed Press, 2023.
Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. BOA Editions, Ltd., 2015.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015.
Driskell, David C., and Los Angeles County Museum Art. Two Centuries of Black American Art. 1976.
duBois, Page. Slaves and Other Objects. University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Dungy, Camille T. Black Nature. University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Enwezor, Okwui. Grief and Grievance. Phaidon Press, 2020.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press, 2008.
---. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.
Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image. 2005.
Fernández, Johanna. The Young Lords. UNC Press Books, 2019.
Foss, Richard. Rum. Reaktion Books, 2012.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Longman, 1980.
Gelburd, Gail, et al. Romare Bearden in Black-and-White. 1997.
Green, Victor H. The Negro Motorist Green Book. Colchis Books.
Hall, Rebecca. Wake. Simon and Schuster, 2021.
Hamad, Ruby. White Tears/Brown Scars. Catapult, 2020.
Hamilton, Virginia. The People Could Fly. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1993.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole and The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. One World, 2024.
Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings. 1895.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. Macmillan, 2008.
---. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022.
Hewett, Jen. This Long Thread. Shambhala Publications, 2021.
HIDDEN HERITAGE. 1985.
hooks. Black Looks. Routledge, 2014.
---. Talking Back. Routledge, 2014.
Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind. Random House, 2025.
---. Teaching To Transgress. Routledge, 2014.
Hughes, Langston. The Ways of White Folks. Vintage, 2011.
Hull, Akasha Gloria, et al. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. 2015.
jake. “Original Sin: The Roots of Slavery in Boston (Ep74) - HUB History: Boston History Podcast.” HUB History, http://facebook.com/hubhistory, 2 Apr. 2018, https://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/original-sin-the-roots-of-slavery-in-boston-ep74/.
Johnson, Mat. Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery (New Edition). Dark Horse Comics, 2018.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property. Yale University Press, 2019.
Lawson, Dhyandra. Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Delmonico Books, 2024.
Ligon, Glenn. Yourself in the World. 2011.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Penguin, 2020.
---. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Penguin UK, 2018.
---. Your Silence Will Not Protect You. 2017.
Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Ballantine Books, 2015.
Mercer, Kobena. Discrepant Abstraction. 2006.
Mitchell, Koritha. Living with Lynching. University of Illinois Press, 2011.
(MoAD), Museum of the African Diaspora, et al. Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold. Cameron, 2019.
Morris, Catherine, and Rujeko Hockley. We Wanted a Revolution. University of Texas Press, 2018.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 2007.
Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined. Duke University Press, 2018.
Newton, John. Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. DigiCat, 2022.
Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage. University of Georgia Press, 2017.
Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens. Strange Fruit. Indiana University Press, 1998.
Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Pickens, Therí Alyce. Black Madness. Duke University Press, 2019.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition. UNC Press Books, 2020.
Smithers, Gregory D. Slave Breeding. University Press of Florida, 2012.
Tate, Claudia. Black Women Writers at Work. Haymarket Books, 2023.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits. Chronicle Books, 2018.
Thomas, Sheree R. Dark Matter. Grand Central Publishing, 2014.
“Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories, Available Online | Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2024.
Warren, Wendy. New England Bound. National Geographic Books, 2017.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901.
Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors. The Floating Press, 2014.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record. DigiCat, 2022.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2023.
---. The Warmth of Other Suns. Vintage, 2011.
Willis, Deborah. Posing Beauty. W. W. Norton, 2009.
“Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, https://withoutsanctuary.org/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2024.
Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro. NYU Press, 2014.
Young, Kevin. Brown. Knopf, 2018.
Zamalin, Alex. Black Utopia. Columbia University Press, 2019.
graphs.