PRC Speaker Series with Wendel A. White
ONLINE ONLY – via Zoom
February 7, 2023
6:30 – 8:30 pm
To attend ONLINE click HERE
Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, NY; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY; the International Center for Photography, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art & American Studies at Stockton University.
More than three decades ago White turned his attention toward the historic narratives of African American culture and community in the U.S. This work has been expressed through projects: Small Towns, Black Lives; Schools for the Colored; Village of Peace; 7 Steps to Freedom; Red Summer; and Manifest. Each of these portfolios examines Black life in the context of community, landscape, architecture, and artifact. He is increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains. The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration. These artifacts are the forensic evidence of Black life and events in the United States. The photographs form a reliquary and a survey of the impulse and motivation to preserve history and memory.
Wendel A. White has received various awards and fellowships including the Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnography, Harvard University, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography, three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, Bunn Lectureship in Photography and grants from Center Santa Fe, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and various artist’s residencies. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections including: Duke University; the New Jersey State Museum; California Institute for Integral Studies; The Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts; En Foco, New York, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Haverford College, PA; University of Delaware; University of Alabama; and the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY.