At the end of the 19th century, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch was paralyzed by color. During a mid-afternoon walk across a fjord, the sky beyond turned a jarring blood red. The color induced an anxiety attack. Munch wrote in his diary of hearing a scream, “the color shrieked,” and soon recounted the incident in what would become one of his most famous paintings, The Scream. 

This overtaking effect of color, with a slight nod to October fun (and fright), is the focus of an upcoming exhibition, A Shriek of Color, which opens with a costumes-encouraged reception Wednesday, October 25, from 6–8 p.m. 

A Halloween-centered art show doesn’t exactly scream prestige. Neither does the fact that it’s held in the lobby of a retirement home, of sorts. The Lobby is in the literal lobby of the Ellen Browning building, a luxury retirement residence owned by philanthropist and business manager Molly McCabe. McCabe built the building specifically for her parents and their friends to grow old in, and its lobby has since served as a space to show her vast private art collection. 

“It kind of turns the idea of lobby art on its head,” says Sima Familant, McCabe’s art advisor and the Lobby’s resident curator. The free public art space opened last spring and has since mounted three shows, featuring names as big as David Hockney and Jenny Holzer, and giving access to works that would otherwise only be seen by a select few. 

Is a Halloween show an attempt at doubling down on this concept of superseding expectations? “It’s not as if we’re showing Halloween art,” Familant says. “It’s not so literal.” She wanted to lean into the instantly recognizable cues surrounding the holiday, repurposing the enthrall one might feel being stopped in their tracks by a scary costume. “You kind of know what it is by a word,” she explains of Shriek. Like Munch glimpsing the blood-red sky, “it stops you,” she says.

The show is filled with major names, like the revered Canadian painter Matthew Wong, who famously died by suicide on the cusp of fame at age 35, in 2019; the pioneering midcentury color field painter Sam Gilliam; and Joan Snyder, a Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow known for her ’70s series of “stroke paintings,” which redefined abstract composition. 

Munch’s The Scream is said to be an emblem of modern anxiety, his abstracted self-portrait depicting a dead-ringer of a new reality shaped by the stressors of modern times—he chalked it up to color, of course. This show speaks, rather spookily, to the next 100 years.