Wendel White uncovers the unseen and unsaid in the history of slavery of African Americans in the United States and slavery’s afterlife; his work reveals how much there is to be discovered, explored, acknowledged and discussed. His powerful exhibition, “Wendel White Folding Time” is on view at the Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum Through October 26. The elegant installation brings together work from three of White’s ongoing projects that explore buildings, sites, and remaining material culture that bring us, today, in confrontation with a history that has largely been overlooked and ignored. The artist cites the writer Isabel Wilkerson, in his introduction to the exhibition:
America is an old house…. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.
The series,“Manifest,” is the product of White’s extensive research about the remnants of slavery held by museums, libraries, historical collections and sites within the original thirteen colonies and the District of Columbia. White photographed each object against a black background. There is a limited history of photography of inanimate objects and it has usually involved forensic or commercial interests. Nothing is for sale here, but you might say White’s project is forensic, in that he brings systematic research to bear on questions of who did what, and when – even if the activities are not currently under litigation. But in our responses to this history of slavery, we inevitably make decisions about justice, historical and present.
We trust what we can see and feel, which is what makes so much material culture poignant. Poets and historians can evoke ideas and feelings with words, but things embody them. To see an everyday object that we know was touched by someone brings us closer to their situation and response than much of the written literature. White doesn’t merely present historical objects; he guides our reading of them through his manipulation of a narrow focus. While we see Jimi Hendrix’s vest, embellished with small mirrors and designs of applied cording that draw upon cultures of the Silk Road,(collection Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (SNMAAHC)), we focus on those cords that loop back and forth at the collar, where they would have touched the musician’s neck. A skull from the Mutter Museum is shown dimly, but White directs us to the inscription penned above the ear, “Negro.” A pair of slave shackles (also SNMAAHC) are turned so we confront the lock with key in it, positioning the viewer as the person responsible for applying the shackles or removing them.
Many of the objects are greatly enlarged. The box of hair straightener whose torn edges give evidence of its use (private collection), the ambrotype of Frederick Douglass, which we know was palm-sized (SNMAAHC), Douglass’s copy of the writings of Robert Burns with a cover worn by use; it was the first book he purchased after slavery (Rush Rhees Library Special Collections, University of Rochester), or the lock of Douglass’s hair, sitting on the piece of paper in which it was wrapped, labeled, and preserved (also Rush Rhees Library). Artifacts don’t get any more intimate or personal, and it is likely that we can all identify with the desire to retain a relic of someone. Hair was a common memento in the late Nineteenth Century, often plaited and inserted in mourning jewelry. That custom has passed, but I suspect that braids and locks of hair reside in many drawers still.
These aren’t just evidence of everyday life – some are actual fragments of bodies, others significant for whom they touched, by that person’s volition or against their will. Wendel White asks us to feel as we observe; he is inviting our empathic response to the history embodied in these physical remnants.
On an adjacent wall hang six, mid-sized photographs, each with an accompanying newspaper clipping. “Red Summer: Racial Violence in the American Landscape 1917-1923” depicts sites of violence against African Americans following World War I, half a century after the Civil War. One photograph shows the edge of a wood; the others are thoroughly un-picturesque scenes of houses, commercial storage, a church, city sidewalks, parking lots, a school crossing sign, and electric lines on poles. The clipping about East St. Louis gives no reason for the violence, nor does that from Georgia. Robberies provoked the crowd in Kentucky. Race riots in Longview, TX, followed a lynching. In Donora, PA, African American workers were brought in as scab laborers during an industrial strike. And African American troops had defended a woman accused of loitering by the police, in Texas.
The newspapers varied in their attitudes toward the black populations. “White Men Pass Resolution Condemning Prof. Jones and the White Men Who Took the Law Into Their Own Hands” ran one headline; since the newspaper had a citation from Frederick Douglass above the masthead, I assume that paper was by and for African Americans.
The ordinary-ness of the contemporary scenes from “Red Summer” acknowledges the ordinary-ness of American racial violence; the lack of historical markers is an index of our unwillingness to record the underside of American history. These sites are a significant part of the American story that many, including numerous current lawmakers and their constituencies, want to ignore. ”Red Summer” resonates with too much current news. These stories are dangerous; and they need to be told.
The third series, “Schools for the Colored,” tells another suppressed story: that of segregated schooling in locations beyond the South, where we might not expect to find it: in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. The schools are varied: some are simple, one-story, wooden structures, others are undecorated, in the manner of industrial buildings. A few of them aspired to more, citing art deco aspiration and even Classical pediments with columns. This raises a particularly ironic history: the Enlightenment revival of Classical ideals, here used in support of apartheid education, itself supported by fear and false science. White digitally suppressed the surrounding landscapes, so they read as ghostly gray, while the schools are shown in detailed black and white. The locations are indistinct enough that they might be anywhere, White suggests. Perhaps you passed one when getting to the exhibition. In several photographs White has placed a building’s black silhouette within the pale landscapes, to represent schools that have not survived. One school for white children no longer stands and White represents it with a white silhouette in a detailed black and white setting; it was in a black neighborhood.
White describes the bleached landscapes as references to W.E.B. Du Bois’s metaphor of “The Veil” as the barrier constructed between racial groups in American society. The large wall, full of row after row of White’s photos of school buildings, is a reproach; these sites are everywhere, but their history is faint in our history books and memories. These repressed memories maintain the veil.
Wendel White Folding Time, to Oct. 26, 2024. Rowan University Art Gallery
Read more coverage of Rowan University Art Gallery in Miles Orvell’s review of Ellen Harvey’s ‘Disappointed Tourist,’ earlier this year at Rowan.
