Homage to a Time When There Were Squares

Josef Albers was a proponent of using colored papers for experimentation in color. He began his Homage to the Square series in the early 1950s. By 1962, the year Students for a Democratic Society published their founding tract The Port Huron Statement, Albers’s composition had already become iconic even as his combinations of colors proliferated. Homage To A Time When There Were Squares mashed up the then-hip politics of SDS with the Albers tradition, wheatpasted to the walls of the Yates Gallery entryway of the Chicago Cultural Center. This was printed, composed, and installed in 2002, forty years after the publication of The Port Huron Statement.