Wendel White: Folding Time

Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum is excited to announce Folding Time, a solo exhibition of Wendel White’s photographic works. The exhibition will open on September 3 and be on view through October 26, 2024, with an opening reception and artist talk on September 12, from 5-7 pm. The artist's talk begins at 5:30.

Wendel White is a distinguished photographer known for focusing on Black history and the legacy of slavery through his foundational projects: Schools for the Colored, Red Summer, and Manifest. The exhibition Folding Time will display a selection of photographs from each series. Through these bodies of work, White is effectively folding time by bringing the past and the present into a shared space.

White’s series Manifest explores Black material culture across public collections in the original thirteen English colonies and Washington, DC, showcasing artifacts that range from receipts for human purchases to everyday items, illuminating the historical narrative of the Black community in America. Schools for the Colored documents segregation with historic African American school buildings, particularly in the northern “Up-South” states. The digital imaging technique that obscures the landscape

surrounding the schools, and in some cases, the schools themselves, is a visual 

representation of the W.E.B. DuBois literary metaphor of the “veil” as a social barrier. 

Red Summer delves into locations where racial violence erupted between 1917 and 1923, combining contemporary landscapes with fragments of historical newspaper reporting to bridge past and present perspectives.