The Colour Line brings together works by Kamilaroi / Brisbane artist Archie Moore in dialogue with drawings by influential African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963).

Archie Moore’s ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity—skin, language, smell, home, flags—as well as the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding, including the broader concerns of racism. For this exhibition, Moore reflects on ideas of empirical evidence from the perspective of Indigenous Australia. His commissioned work begins by revisiting The Australian Constitution of 1901 that stated that Aboriginal people were to be no part of statistical information. Alongside this new work, Moore will recreate and update his Family Tree 2018 wall drawing, a sprawling chalkboard style personal genealogy.

For the American section of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, Du Bois led the creation of over 60 hand-drawn charts, maps and infographics, that visualised data on the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation in the state of Georgia. These extraordinary examples of 19th-century data visualisation gather together information on the numbers of people who owned land, who were once slaves, who had kitchen appliances and professional degrees and other markers of class.