Color: Theories and Structures investigates the ideas and strategies that have informed 20th-century artistic practices focused on color. By selecting key works by a diverse group of artists, this exhibition demonstrates how color has functioned as a tool to explore ideas about visual perception, emotional states, and scientific discoveries.

Humans are only aware of a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum known as visible light. In combination, these wavelengths create the colors of the rainbow that constitute our perception of the world around us. For millennia, scholars, intellectuals and artists have investigated how our eyes and brains perceive color. It has only been within the last few centuries that we have begun to understand the complexity of light, color, and the important role they play in our daily lives. Focusing on formal concerns such color and flatness, artists on exhibit such as Milton Avery and Josef Albers, have inspired and influenced the trajectory of post-painterly abstraction.