Whiteness, A Wayward Construction

Whiteness is a group exhibition of 29 artists working in various media who explore representations of whiteness and the image of the white in the public imagination. The underlying assumption in the exhibit is that everyone in the United States is constructed in the political imagination as a racial subject. Following this notion, the exhibit then considers whiteness in order to make visible what often seems invisible when cast as the norm. In order to dissuade this tendency towards disembodiment and invisibility, this exhibit attempts to locate and embody whiteness in a particular experience of being white. The exhibit is subdivided into three categories which overlap on one another, and are meant to suggest a movement from unawareness to recognition to immersion/emersion: White Out explores the idea of white people not seeing themselves, Mirror, Mirror… explores the concept of whites seeing themselves and how others see them, and The Graying of Whiteness presents artists who are mixing up the issues and present a “third way” of looking.