Schools for the Colored: Wendel A. White

Please join us on Saturday, August 27 at 3PM for the opening of our next exhibition, Schools for the Colored by Wendel A. White. This exhibition will include a selection of images from this fifty-work project that surveys the architecture and geography connected to the historic system of racially segregated schools within the landscape of southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

Schools for the Colored is an extension of the ideas that formed the project Small Towns, Black Lives, in that, it is a continuation of White’s journey through the African American landscape. He began making photographs of historically African American school buildings during the very first weeks of the Small Towns, Black Lives project more than thirty years ago. In Schools for the Colored, White began to pay attention to the many structures and sites (also making photographs of places where segregated schools once stood) that operated as segregated schools.

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.

He has received various awards and fellowships including 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 (Juror’s Choice), the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco. 

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. Recent projects include Red Summer; Manifest; Schools for the Colored; Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel; Small Towns, Black Lives; and others.