50 Over 50: The Opportunity - Penny Cagney's Invisible Palettes

At 69, Penny Cagney is working with a new device created by a group of scientists at Arizona State University, including Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek and Prof. Nathan Newman. The technology is called the HyLighter, and it uses 13 programmable monochromatic light beams to simulate how color is perceived across different species and visual systems.

She's exploring the science of color and vision, creating oil paintings designed specifically for the capabilities of this device. The paintings reveal the rich diversity of visual experience—how humans with colorblindness see, as well as how other species with more or less visual capacity than our own perceive their environments.

In February 2025, she'll debut an exhibition called "Invisible Palettes" that features ten 20-inch round works and five large-scale landscape paintings exploring the science of sight and the subjectivity of color. The round paintings are inspired by Ishihara Plates—tools traditionally used to diagnose colorblindness. The landscapes are large, brilliantly colored, multi-layered. When viewed through the new technology, the works illuminate a spectrum of simultaneous ways of seeing.

Color perception is far from universal. It is shaped not only by the properties of light and pigment, but also by the viewer's biology, context, and cultural understanding. While we often take for granted that we all see the same "red" or "blue," science shows that even among individuals with so-called "normal" vision, perception varies greatly.

How's her work different now than it was before she hit 50? She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, more than 40 years after her BFA. That experience upended what she had learned so long ago. Just one example: When she was studying as a young artist there were a handful of disciplines—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film. Now there is a profusion of practices and an entirely different context for your own work.

What's actually hard about being an artist at this point in her life? The worry that she will not have enough time for all she wants to do.

Someone just turned 50 and wants to start making art—what does she tell them? Read Nell Painter's book "Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over."

Does she try to keep up with what matters in the art world? She's interested in the art world today but it does not dominate her attention or influence her art greatly.

What do artists her age bring to the table that younger artists don't? Perspective.

What keeps her going when everything feels impossible? The world and life in it is often so beautiful despite all the problems.

What does she wish she'd known when she was younger? That she would in time have the opportunity to be the artist she wanted to be. And that trends in the art world are cyclical, but they never return quite the same way.

She's so grateful for the opportunity.

Penny Cagney was born, raised, and educated in the greater Chicago area. She holds a BFA, magna cum laude, from Loyola University Chicago; an MA in Arts Management from Columbia College Chicago; and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021). She has exhibited at California State University Fresno, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Artist Association, the Monterey Museum of Art, and the International Museum of Surgical Sciences in Chicago.

While making art has always been her deepest passion, Cagney also worked in nonprofit leadership and fundraising, supporting organizations including the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, the National Cultural Center of Egypt, the ASU Art Museum, Scottsdale Arts Center, the Musical Instrument Museum, and the Music Academy of the West. She authored and edited five books on management, has taught at the graduate level, and has presented internationally on leadership and philanthropy.

Today, she devotes herself full-time to her studio practice, dividing her time between Santa Cruz, California and Tempe, Arizona.

Vision does not exist in isolation—it evolves within the greater context of nature. At 69, Penny Cagney is revealing the hidden diversity in how living beings sense and interpret color. She's exploring how meaning and perception are co-constructed, inviting viewers to question assumptions about shared visual experience.

And she's grateful for the opportunity.

Connect with Penny: Website: pennycagney.com Instagram: @pennycagney_art