Reception & Artist in Conversation with Makeda Best, May 10, 2025.

Wendel A. White’s inaugural exhibition, Schools for the Colored & Manifest, presents photographs carefully selected from a larger portfolio of the same name. Schools for the Colored looks at the physical structures – both standing and demolished – of segregated schools of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

In White’s ongoing project Manifest we see archival objects from various public collections throughout the U.S. photographed in rich color on uniformly black backgrounds. 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.

On view April 5 through May 31, 2025
Rena Bransten Gallery
102 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA 02138