Series
On Indigo & Rice
A three-part series with artists Charmaine Bee and Candace Lin
On Indigo and Rice is a three-part series of public programs guided by artists Charmaine Bee and Candice Lin. Across a workshop, conversation, and residency, this new program series highlights indigo and rice for their parallel historical contexts and transformations across the Atlantic and Pacific. Grounded in Bee and Lin’s work, an investigation of rice and indigo as materials and subjects for food, dyes, and drawing brings these narratives into focus through the lens of the present and personal. Both endemic to parts of Asia and Africa, indigo and rice were transported across the globe through colonial trade routes and brought to the American colonies in the 17th-century. As two of the most significant cash crops, their cultivation relied on the knowledge and labor of enslaved African people, inextricably tying their proliferation to this colonial legacy and necessarily informing our understanding of their contemporary uses. The comparative consideration of indigo and rice traces the intersections of today’s agricultural and textile industries and understandings of how labor and capitalism operates under a global colonial project. Centering their shared histories and uses not just as food and dye, but as commodified crops entwined with a colonial economy, we can expand our understanding of discrete ingredients as enmeshed topographies and threaded portals.