Can we still imagine a time when Wendel A. White’s “Schools for the Colored” would not astound? Today, this assembly of 14 pigment-printed digital photographs depicting formerly segregated schools trembles with freighted tension, oscillating between the distant past and an ominous future.
“Millers Grove, Shawnee National Forest, Illinois” (2003/2025), the earliest work here, proffers the black outline of a simple shack-like shape bisected by a tree trunk with bare branches. Closer inspection brings three place-marking flags into sharp focus. The surrounding landscape is a misty grisaille of trees in early spring, dulled in a digital veil. “Millers Grove” is one of three works in which the structure of a schoolhouse has been destroyed, serving as what White calls “placeholders” of the “unresolved ideologies (living or dead) that still haunt the American landscape.” Another placeholder is the steep pitched roof of “Burlington, Ohio” (2007/2025) its short eaves suspended atop a squat structure that once stood on coordinates other than the gridded system that now also determines the flanking garage and flag-bearing telephone pole.
Were “Schools for the Colored” not so directly focused on sites of segregation in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Illinois, one might call these empty outlines centered in otherwise mundane landscapes “black holes” in the fabric of collective memory. Such a dismissal, however, sells short the conflicted legacy of segregated schooling. White’s archival project reveals lingering traces of institutional apartheid in the northern states, using allusions to architecture to indict historic and ongoing educational disparity. But these sites are also revealed as spaces of pride and scholarship for the African American staffers who have dedicated their lives to the social and scholastic progress of their students. Some of these buildings still serve as vital community centers. Others are long abandoned. Unresolved legacies? Indeed.
To toggle between the veiled grounds and the crisp structures in White’s images is to understand the disputable place occupied by history itself: ever-present and dialectical. That this body of work, first produced between 2007-2010 and recently reprinted, remains salient in 2025 is the point.
Futurity determines our experience of art. Many of these schoolhouses adhere to a simplified, pared-down neoclassicism associated with the generalized banality of 19th-century municipal buildings, from the 1854 Greek Revival “South School, Yellow Springs, Ohio” (2007/2025) to the 1920’s Neo-Georgian Revival “Court Street School Freehold, New Jersey” (2007/2025), with its mullioned windows and delicate white quoins. These brick buildings ironically evoke Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s panoptic slave plantation in Virginia.
Lest we forget, Beaux-Arts Neoclassicism is becoming the official house style of the current administration (as it was for the Nazis), hell-bent as they are on revoking basic access to education and funding for the institutions that took this country out of segregation after the Second World War. A decade ago, White’s portfolio might have laid bare the hypocrisy at the heart of the Northern states after Reconstruction. But seeing “Schools for the Colored” today feels of a fresh new fate.
An additional sequence of nine still-life images titled “Manifest” hangs in a separate gallery. All of the subjects have been photographed attractively in color, and are isolated against deep black backgrounds. Each of the objects — abolitionist books, daguerreotypes, tape recorders, scrapbooks with slave cloth, etc. — comes from museums and libraries and constitute a scattershot but (for now) publicly available archive of African American history.
It took some time for me to recognize that the schoolhouses and relic prints were roughly the same size, one group crisply outlined, the other blurring into black. Together they reveal the dialectic of segregation or self-realization, capitulation or resistance that constitutes choices made in crisis. In so doing, the photographs interrogate the fraught remains of our shared history, helping us to imagine a way forward.
