Fuchsia, coral, peach, bubblegum, magenta, blush — countless different shades of pink can be found in the SP/N Gallery’s “PINK!” exhibition, which debuted Aug. 23. “PINK!” presents viewers with a dizzying array of pink artwork and performance, encouraging viewers to reconsider their feelings and presuppositions about the color by presenting new perspectives.  

“PINK!” was curated by Diane Durant, associate professor of instruction at the Bass School of Arts and Humanities, who set out to broaden viewers’ understanding of what pink can mean given different mediums and creative contexts. Durant said she reached out to a variety of artists who work with pink and asked about their thoughts and relationships to the color. The exhibition will run until Sept. 28 and will host a curator talk Sept. 5 at 7:30 p.m. in the SP/N Gallery. 

“Different shades of pink really … can create different responses for a viewer,” Durant said. “I want the viewer to come in and be wowed by the different ways pink is used, and the different reasons why pink is used.”  

The exhibit displays a diverse range of mediums including felting, sculpture, photography, performance, drawing, painting, ceramics and animation. Durant invited multiple artists she discovered by scouring through Instagram for creatives that prioritized pink in their artwork. These artists include UTD alums Jessica Fuentes and Brent Fields. 

Fuentes, a 2004 alum with a  degree in art and performance, is a photographer mostly working with film. Three photographic prints on aluminum Fuentes shot earlier this year are displayed in the “PINK!” exhibit: “Between Night and Day,” “First Day of the New Year” and “Across Time and Space.” 

Fuentes said her art involves combining images taken at different times and locations, speaking to the idea of memory and past and present. “Across Time and Space” is a diptych, two related but distinct images, one of which depicts Fuentes’ oldest daughter in a snowy, naturally blue-tinted image, and the other her youngest daughter, the image stained pink after an accident in developing the film. Fuentes said the artwork pushed her to reconsider pink. 

“Pink is not a color that I like,” Fuentes said. “I think I’m kind of anti-pink, always have been my whole life. But with that diptych, my oldest daughter, I feel like she’s a lot like me; she wasn’t really a ‘pink’ girl. She wasn’t into those traditional feminine roles. But my youngest daughter is that. That’s just who she is. So, I think it’s funny to have these two portraits of them that show a little bit of the differences between [them]. The big takeaway from the exhibition is you can’t pigeonhole color. One thing can mean so many different things to different people [and] can be representative of many different things. It contains multitudes.” 

Fields, a 2023 alum with a degree in visual and performing arts, did a drag performance during the exhibition’s opening night inspired by cult classic movie “Mean Girls” and the fashion doll Barbie. Taking the stage as Marissah D’Amour Starr, they mixed acting and lip syncing into a satirical performance. Megan Trainor’s song “Me Too” played as Starr acted out scenes from “Mean Girls” as the cocky pink diva Regina George. 

“I wanted them to enjoy [my performance],” Starr said. “I wanted something that they can enjoy, identify with or connect with in some sort of sense. And then my other biggest thing that I wanted people to take away from it was just to be inspired. I wanted people to see something that maybe they don’t traditionally see often, but it would give them an inspiration.” 

Starr said their relationship to pink has evolved as they’ve grown older. They said they had always been conditioned to believe that pink is only a girls’ color, but as they grew older, they began viewing it more neutrally.  

“Pink is just a color that, for me, is bright, vibrant, happy,” Starr said. “I also have a relationship to it, in a sense, because my grandmother’s favorite color is pink and I’m very close to her. And pink is also an extension of red, which is my favorite color. My whole outlook on the color has changed to where I don’t try to limit it to certain people [wearing pink].” 

The idea for “PINK!” was born earlier this year when SP/N Gallery director Danielle Avram was talking to Durant about upcoming exhibitions, including a horror show. The conversation led Durant to conceptualize an exhibit completely opposite to a horror show, which she described as “something fruity, something sweet, something soft” — associations that immediately made her think of the color pink. As Durant began planning the exhibit, she reflected on what pink meant to her. 

“In the curator’s essay that I wrote, I talked about my relationship with pink and how important it even was for me to understand that pink doesn’t just have to be feminine,” Durant said.  

Durant said she grew up as a tomboy, thinking of pink as “too girly,” but her perspective changed upon entering adulthood. 

“I can see all the ways that pink is powerful and all the ways that pink can be used strategically to create nuance, especially in these artworks when pink becomes a major part of the work,” Durant said. “It isn’t just a color that’s a highlight. It’s not just incidental, it’s very purposeful.”