The Human Palette

Angélica Dass is a Brazilian artist, born into a family “full of colours”, where racial identity was never an issue. Despite this, throughout her childhood she experienced racial stereotyping, being mistaken for a maid many times. She draws from personal experience, making art out of people’s preconceptions of color. Her Humanae project is “a chromatic inventory of human skin tones.”

Dass is taking portraits of thousands of volunteers from around the world. She photographs them against a white background, selects an eleven-pixel square from the subject’s nose, replaces the white background with the color of that square, and finally names each portrait with the corresponding code in the Pantone palette. The outcome, which the artist regards as “work in progress”, is a continuum made of hundreds of skin tones that reminds us both of