The new exhibition, Wendel A. White: Remains • Remnants • Reliquaries, is on display now through Nov. 26 at the OU Art Gallery.
Wendel A. White, “The Works of Robert Burns,” First Book Purchased After Slavery by Frederick Douglass, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, NY, 2009.
Wendel A. White, Whitesboro Head Start, Whitesboro, New Jersey, 1990.
Wendel A. White, Omaha, NE, Sept 28, 1919. The Arkansas Democrat, Little Rock, AR, Sept 29, 1919, 2012.
Wendel A. White, Slave Shackles, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, 2016.
Wendel A. White, Carpenter Street School, Woodbury, New Jersey, 2010.
October 31, 2023
The Oakland University Department of Art and Art History will present the Jean S. and Fred M. Braun Memorial Lecture “Wendel A. White: Reflections in the Archive” with Dr. Deborah Willis at 5 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 16, inside the Oakland University Art Gallery.
This presentation is intended to complement the exhibition Wendel A. White: Remains • Remnants • Reliquaries, which is currently on display at the OU Art Gallery. It is made possible by the generous support of the Jean S. and Fred M. Braun Memorial Lecture Fund, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Division of Student Affairs and Diversity.
An artist, author and curator, Willis is University Professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She also has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the Black body, women and gender.
Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of slavery and emancipation, contemporary women photographers.
“She really put the subject of African American photography on the map,” said Dr. Claude Baillargeon, a professor of art history at OU. “The history of Black photographers had really not been written before, so she wrote a book about it called Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present. It was the first time that we had a book that told the history of African American photographers.”
In addition, Willis is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among many other books and exhibition catalogs. Her curated exhibitions include “Framing Moments from the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts” at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, “Framing Beauty” at the Henry Art Gallery, “Home: Reimagining Interiority” at the YoungArts Gallery, and “’Free as they want to be’: Artists Committed to Memory” presented at the National Underground Freedom Center as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial.
She was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. Fellow and a recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art.
“Deborah and Wendel have known each other for at least 40 years, so when I was looking for someone to speak about his work as part of the Braun Lecture, she was the first person that came to mind,” Baillargeon said. “She really is one of the biggest names in the game.”
Baillargeon is also the curator of the new exhibition, Wendel A. White: Remains • Remnants • Reliquaries, on display now through Nov. 26 at the OU Art Gallery.
The exhibition features four wide-ranging bodies of work created by White over the last 35 years, including Manifest (2009-Present), Red Summer (2011-2019), Schools for the Colored (2002-2012), and Small Towns, Black Lives (1989-2002).
“Sharply focused on his African American heritage, White has in turn trained his lens on remnants of once predominantly Black communities, on the architectural remains of school segregation, on published and revisited accounts of racial terrorism, and on the too-often overlooked artifacts of Black lives,” Baillargeon said.
For more information about Wendel A. White: Remains • Remnants • Reliquaries, visit https://calendar.oakland.edu/art-arthistory/event/9352-braun-memorial-lecture-wendel-a-white-remains-remnants-
About the Annual Jean S. and Fred M. Braun Memorial Lecture
The Braun Lecture is an endowed annual lecture for Art and Art History initiated by Jean Braun, who was a professor emerita of psychology and former chair at Oakland. Jean retired in 1991. The endowment was set up in memory of her husband, Fred, who had a great love for the visual arts. Jean passed away in 2016.