Wendel A. White: Schools for the Colored & Manifest

April 5 – May 31, 2025 | Reception & Artist in Conversation with Makeda Best: May 10

Schools for the Colored, carefully selected from a larger portfolio of the same name, looks at the physical structures – both standing and demolished – of segregated schools of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In these black and whites prints, the buildings that still exist are photographically represented, and the schools that have been destroyed are depicted by black silhouettes of those structures, nodding to the way space can hold invisible memories of the past.  While the former schools and silhouettes are sharply in focus, the surrounding landscape is masked as if faded, a reference to W. E. B. DuBois’ literary metaphor (from The Souls of Black Folk) of the veil as a social barrier.

“I often remind people that history explains everything. If one wants to know the basis of a particular condition, one need only look to history for a clear explanation. And so it is with the disparity in the allocation of educational resources between white and Black students in America’s schools.” -Dawoud Bey (from Excavating Histories: Wendel White’s Schools for the Colored, Nueva Luz)

On view in our south gallery is a selection from White’s ongoing project Manifest. Here we see archival objects from various public collections throughout the U.S. photographed in rich color on uniformly black backgrounds. The objects included are examinations of material culture – books, daguerreotypes, lunchboxes, tape recorders. Some of these items hold great significance, while others are simply quotidian representations of daily life in the history of the African American community. While the selections for this exhibition shift focus to the 20th century, the histories of slavery, abolition, and the U.S. Civil War are a few of the narratives present in the project at large. White maintains a keen interest in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains, and the ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries, and millennia, suggesting a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration.

Learn more here.

Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies

I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains…Manifest is an effort to seek out the artifacts and material evidence of the American construct and representation of race.

— Wendel A. White

Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is the culmination of a multiyear journey by photographer Wendel A. White to find and document African American material culture in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. This “personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections” includes both singular objects connected to significant figures (a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair, Malcolm X’s tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatment—each object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of field—the distinction between the “significant” and the “quotidian” dissolves, as White makes it clear they are all important pieces of forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.

New essays by Cheryl Finley, Ilisa Barbash, and Leigh Raiford provide historical and sociological context for the objects in White’s images, while conversations with Deborah Willis and Brenda Dione Tindal delve into White’s personal history, his life as a photographer, and the bodies of work that led to Manifest | Thirteen Colonies.

Learn more and order your copy here.