Exhibition dates: January 10 – February 24, 2011
Artist reception: January 11, 2011, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Bernstein Gallery, Robertson Hall, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
Gallery hours: Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment

Contact: Kate Somers, #609.497.2441

Wendel A. White has worked on several different photographic projects, all of which focus on identity and community in the African-American experience. Each series highlights a particular aspect of the landscape of African-American lives, whether historic or present-day. With a spare, elegant approach, White exploits the potential of digital photography as he documents and memorializes people and places often unseen and unknown.

Schools for the Colored is a series of images depicting the buildings and landscapes of what were racially segregated schools at the southern boundaries of the northern United States. As a metaphor for their isolation within a larger educational system, White has separated the crisp, fully defined school buildings from their immediate environment by white washing the landscape in which the schools were situated. They appear to float within a veiled landscape.

Wendel A. White 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. He has received numerous awards, including: two Fellowships (1993 and 2009) from the NJ State Council for the Arts; a 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography; a 2005 grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and a 2010 New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco, Inc. His work has been included in various museum and corporate collections, individual and group exhibitions and publications. In 2003, the Noyes Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of the Small Towns, Black Lives project which continued to travel through 2007. His work has been included in such publications as Posing Beauty by Deborah Willis, exposure magazine, Neuva Luz, and Photo Review. Images from Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel were recently included in Transition magazine, published by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Photo credit:
Schools for the Colored, Bordentown, New Jersey
20 x 24 inches