Wendel A. White

Wendel A. White received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and an MFA in Photography from the University of Texas at Austin.

In 2003 White was appointed as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support his photography of black communities in rural and small town settings. He has previously received grants and fellowships from various sources including the New Jersey Council for the Arts. His work is represented in museums and corporate collections, exhibitions, and publications.

Recent exhibitions of this work have been held at The Atwater-Kent Museum, Philadelphia; The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; Johnson and Johnson World Headquarters, New Brunswick, NJ; The Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ; Manchester Craftsman Guild, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Smithsonian Arts and Industries South Gallery, Washington, DC. The Smithsonian exhibition accompanied the publication of Deborah Willis' book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers from 1840 to present.

White served on the Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education (1992-1999) and as board chairperson (1996-1999) and as a member of regional boards for New Jersey Save Outdoor Sculpture (advisory) and the Atlantic City Historical Museum. He has also served on the board of directors of the New Jersey State Council for the Humanities.

White has taught photography at the Cooper Union School of Art, the School of Visual Arts, and the International Center for Photography, New York. He is currently Professor of Art at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

First Baptist Church, Chesilhurst, New Jersey

First Baptist Church, Chesilhurst, New Jersey, 1993. From the series "Small Towns, Black Lives." Used with permission of the photographer.

Court Street School, Freehold, New Jersey, 2003. From the series “Schools for the Colored.” Used with permission of the photographer.

Untitled, Dimona, Israel, 2006. From the series “Pictures from the New World: An African American Village in Israel.” Used with permission of the photographer.

Wendel White's highly publicized series “Small Towns, Black Lives” was exhibited at The Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, NJ in 2003. Accompanied by an impressive book, the exhibition subsequently traveled to a variety of locations in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

A similar series, “Schools for the Colored,” includes black and white photographs of schools from the era of segregation, many of them located in southern New Jersey. Like “Small Towns, Black Lives,” this series incorporates text along with the images. The example shown above, “Court Street School, Freehold,” illustrates this combination of text and image.

A more recent series taken in color was made in the “Village of Peace” community in Dimona, Israel. The community of Dimona was established nearly forty years ago by the African Hebrew Israelites. Originally a group of black Americans, mostly from the Chicago area, they left the United States in the late 1960s, moved first to Liberia, and finally settled in Israel’s Negev desert.

In addition to the various documentary series described above, White’s photographic work also includes improvised or manipulated images of landscapes, insects, and aquatic creatures.

(KNO, Spring 2007)