The White Room

by Oscar Salguero

The color white is the absence of memory.

-Stephen King

NYC, 2027

85 degrees in May. 

Biking through the Manhattan Bridge. Up Second Avenue. Eighty blocks left to the Met. A friend once told me that people in New Orleans wear long sleeve shirts in the Summer. As you sweat, the fabric pulls the moisture away from your skin. The air flow keeps you cool. 

[Red light]

“SunAway SPF 70. Broad Spectrum. Protect what you love.”

I always thought that my darker skin was an advantage in the hotter season, but UV rays have no mercy. Their agenda is to penetrate, forcing skin to either produce melanin or photo-oxidate. What did we even use before the invention of sunscreen? Probably natural oils, plant-based ointments… Sunscreen does have a special aroma. Transports me to childhood, hints of pool chlorine. Bright white. Think of it: it’s like wearing a mineral film. All rays reflect away.

I arrived.

“Color Worlding: Innovative Pigments in Incan Artifacts. April 6 – July 10, 2027. The Metropolitan Museum of Art”

It’s rare to see an entire exhibition in New York dedicated to Peruvian objects similar to those I grew up visiting at the Museo de la Nación in Lima.

“… through a series of ingenious treatments, these pre-Columbian artifacts represent the physical possibilities of coloring worlds in the Andean environment…”

“…a reconsideration of naturally-sourced pigment cultures, a reminder of ancient locality as we enter an era of flourishing sumbioregions.” 

As I pass through the ceramics and textiles section, and their beautiful uses of cochineal pigments, I can’t help but notice the whiteness of the room. White ceiling, white pedestals. A series of objects floating in a contextless void, connected back to reality through museum labels. In the world of paints, this is Pigment White 6, also known as brilliant white, the whitest white. It comes from titanium dioxide. I know this from my exhibition design days. 

Cultural theorist and personal mentor, Steven Mark Klein, once wrote an enigmatic piece on the gallery of art dealer Leo Castelli. Dimensionally 21’9” x 25’8”, Steven would describe it as “just a room”, though one that originated the contemporary art gallery system and witnessed foundational works by conceptual artists like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, or Robert Rauschenberg (who presented his White Painting series there in 1968). In the story, it is 2014 and Steven sits by one of the windowsills of the gallery, with the sun on his back, facing a Jörg Immendorff piece on a pure white wall. Coming back after four decades, he contemplates the false mythology of glamour and power, of paid programming that the art world has devolved into. A grotesque transformation from an original promise of a space for experiencing truth. “All I can say is that it can be very dark outside of that room.”

The room, located at 4 East 77th Street is only a five minute walk from The Met. 

Many of those artworks, though visionary and of high intellectual and cultural (and monetary) value, remain the products of a postwar, European/American male consciousness. A tradition favoring authorship and individual transcendence.

“In 1791, [British mineralogist] William Gregor discovered titanium dioxide in black magnetic sand in Cornwall, and in 1795 [German chemist] M H Klaproth isolated the oxide from mineral rutile in Hungary, but the first commercial production of titanium dioxide pigment did not take place until the 1920s.”

Found it. This is the piece I was looking for. It is called a qero, a type of tall, wooden ritual drinking vessel produced right before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in the 1530s. In my opinion, it is the most noteworthy artifact of the show. It depicts drawings of various organisms (snakes, butterflies, trees) but most significantly a series of red birds with white beaks. These white pigments have been determined, via their geochemical signature, to be composed of titanium dioxide, pushing back the discovery and use of this material at least 300 years earlier than previously suggested. Their author(s): unknown.

On the description label, it reads: “The proximity of the origin of this qero to Giacomo Deposit, a titanium ore located in Tacna, Peru, further confirms that this artifact is the oldest one employing titanium dioxide as a pigment color, preceding the lead white variation introduced from Europe by the Spanish influence.”

“This mineral deposit was being offered for exploitation as a commercial mine for titanium dioxide and silica in 2009, and several websites describing it remained as of 2018.”

I am reminded of a time in 2020 when artist Hugo Hopping invited me to participate in a curatorial program in Copenhagen titled The Curator is the Weather. I will never forget this provocative phrase he shared with us right at the start of the gathering: “The Anthropocene is in fact Art and Art is the Anthropocene”. 

Hugo expanded on this in the book Cerro Point Blanco(2020), which he co-edited for Danish art collective Lehman Brothers, and which referred to titanium extraction in the north of Chile by a mysterious American company called White Mountain Titanium Corporation: “From man-made interventions, terraformations, unintended impacts and consequences, raw material extraction, repurposing, pouring, dripping, toning, melting, refining, expanding – the entire language of the anthropocene is mirrored in art.”

These days the extraction of titanium comes primarily from Ilmenite and Rutile mines, mostly in China, at a rate that seems to have no end in spite of the finitude of the source matter.

The white walls beyond the qero reflect something back at me. It is not peace nor anxiety. A thought is forming but can’t quite articulate it.

I am leaving now. This time by subway – it’s almost 90 out there. 

As I wait for the 6 line, I google “titanium dioxide news” and select the first article that appears, dated April 12, 2025:

“Titanium dioxide nanoparticles (TiO2-NPs), whose use spans industrial products such as toothpaste, sunscreen, paper, cosmetics, pigments, and ceramic opacifiers, have recently been found in an alarming number of deep sea species, resulting in irreversible DNA damage and a drop in reproduction rates – Center for Neopelagic Species Research”

The screen goes blank.