The Center for Art and Visual Culture presents "White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art," organized by curator Maurice Berger, from October 9 through January 10. The exhibition features works by Max Becher & Andrea Robbins, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman and Gary Simmons.

"White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" is the first exhibition of art that explores race and racism from the perspective of white people. Over the past 20 years, the cultural and scholarly discourse around race has expanded to include the study of whiteness and white privilege. This inquiry represents a radical shift in the way we think and talk about race in the United States.

Since the advent of the modern civil rights movement, people of color have usually been responsible for leading the debate and discussion about race and racism -- a discourse that has traditionally centered on the issue of African-American, Latino, Asian-American, and American-Indian victimization. While people of color are forced to evaluate the status of their race in relation to the prejudice they experience every day, most white people, even the most liberal, are usually oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color.

It is precisely this unwillingness to mark whiteness, to assign it meaning, that has freed most white people from the responsibility of understanding their complicity in the social and cultural economy of racism. The study of whiteness asks all Americans -- and especially white people -- to take stock of the political, psychological, economic, and cultural implications of white skin, white entitlement, and white privilege.

A number of visual artists -- some white, some of color -- have taken their lead from progressive writers and scholars who have used the concept of "whiteness" to denote the racial counterpart of "blackness." To these artists, whiteness is something that must be marked, represented, and explored. To them, whiteness is not just a color. It is also a ubiquitous and unexamined state of mind and body -- a powerful norm that had been so constant and persistent in society that white people have never needed to acknowledge or name it.

"White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" gives voice to 12 contemporary artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbin's German Indian series (1997-98) -- photographs of German men, women, and children who regularly attend carnivals dressed up as Native Americans -- examines white people's fascination with and appropriation of racial otherness.

The exhibition also includes Nancy Burson's Untitled (Guys Who Look Like Jesus) (2000-01), the culmination of a national search for people who believe they look like Christ, depicts eight men of varying ages and races. The series challenges one of Christianity's (and whiteness') most generative and foundational myths: that of Aryan purity as a metaphor of godliness and the triumph over evil.

Wendy Ewald's White Girl's Alphabet-Andover, Massachusetts (2002), a project created in collaboration with teenage subjects, represents a poignant, humanistic exploration of the vulnerabilities and ambivalence that underwrite both whiteness and femininity.

"White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art" will be accompanied by a 100-page catalog edited by Maurice Berger, and is the first book devoted to the subject of whiteness, race and art.

CAVC Curator Maurice Berger is the author of the critically acclaimed White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) -- which was named as a finalist for the 2000 Horace Mann Bond Book Award of Harvard University and is being adapted as a television documentary for PBS. Berger is also a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics of the New School for Social Research in New York. His articles have appeared in many journals and newspapers, including Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Village Voice, October, Wired, and The Los Angeles Times.

The CAVC is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (410) 455-3188 or go to www.umbc.edu/cavc. For more information on other works in the exhibition or the catalog, visit the online press release.

Photo Credits

Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#405) (2000), color photograph, edition of six, 44" x 33". Courtesy the Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, and Metro Pictures, New York.

Gary Simmons, Big Still (2001), painted foam, fiberglass, wood, metal. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.