Brooklyn Museum: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Red, Yellow, Brown

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Red, Yellow, Brown

Portfolio/Series: from the "Colour Me" series

Berni Searle’s Colour Me series, 1998–2000, focuses on the colonial history of the artist’s native Cape Town, South Africa, established in the seventeenth century as a refreshment station on the Dutch East India Company’s spice trade route with Indonesia. A large population of indentured Indian slaves were sent to the Cape to work for the Dutch settlers, and they became an integral part of the city’s population and culture. In Red, Yellow, Brown, Searle employs the language of ethnography and anthropology to address and challenge racism in South African politics, history, and visual culture. Transforming her body into a fetishized object for display, she is covered with three different spices: paprika (Red), turmeric (Yellow), and cloves (Brown). The work speaks to the hybridity created by indentured servitude and the cultural and racial mixing of natives, colonizers, and colonized (Indian, Dutch, and African). The larger Colour Me series also functions as a direct reference to apartheid and the South African government’s creation of a third racial category for mixed ethnicities, called “coloured,” of which Searle is a part.

Artist: Berni Searle, South African, born 1964
Medium: Inkjet print
Dates: 1999
Dimensions: each print: 39 x 47 in. (99.1 x 119.4 cm)
Collections: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Museum Location: This item is not on view
Accession Number: L2007.8.9a-c
Edition: 1/3
Credit Line: On loan from The Arthur M. Sackler Collections in honor of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Image: Overall, CUR.L2007.8.9c.jpg. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Collections: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Red, Yellow, Brown