RC Art Gallery

Red Summer: Racial Violence in the American Landscape, 1917-1923

January 8 - February 21, 2025

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The public is cordially invited to an artist's talk on February 21 at 4:30 pm in the Art Gallery followed by a reception.

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The Red Summer portfolio represents the stories of various locations in the American landscape where racial violence (often characterized as “Race Wars” at the time) erupted between 1917 and 1923. These years of conflict reveal several aspects of racial anxiety that inform our contemporary experience, including, though not limited to; racism, fear of violent black revolt, lynching, poverty, mass incarceration, and competition for employment. The term “Red Summer” was first used by James Weldon Johnson to describe the violent attacks against black communities during 1919.  

Though the events of the early twentieth century seem to be remote and fading apparitions of an American past; my work is concerned with the power and influence of our shared historical narrative upon the present. The upheaval of Red Summer occurred approximately fifty years after the American Civil War, fifty years before the height of the Civil Rights Era, and three centuries after the first enslaved Africans arrived in English colonies that would become the United States. 

The project combines photographs of the contemporary landscape made at or near the site of racial conflict with fragmented selections of contemporaneous newspaper reporting (1917-1923). In many cases, the newsprint images include the surrounding stories or advertisements. The combination of the landscape photograph and the reproduction of newspaper fragments (which invade the contemporary with a narrative from the past), is a rupture and a conversation on the timeline between past and present. 

The conceptualization of “the veil” as expressed by DuBois, has been a visual metaphor for the representation of race within my work for several decades; particularly in the two projects known as, Schools for the Colored and Red Summer. The newspaper, in its role as a public record, commentary, and historic archive, is a veil of information through which most of the country as well as many in the international community, understood and misunderstood these events. 

Wendel A. White was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He was awarded a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin. White is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University, NJ.