The JKC Gallery is thrilled to bring back two artists who shared their work in their solo shows at the JKCG and who will now share their incredible work for our Third Thursdays talk.
Wendel White
Wendel A. White 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 taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, NY; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY; the International Center for Photography, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology; and is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University.
His work has received various awards and fellowships including; a 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnography, Harvard University; a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; a photography grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and a New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections including:
- The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX
- Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL
- Archive of Documentary Arts, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, NC
- Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL
- En Foco Inc., Bronx, NY
- New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
White has served on the boards of various non-profit and public organizations including the Society for Photographic Education, Kodak Educational Advisory Council, NJ Save Outdoor Sculpture, New Jersey Black Culture and Heritage Foundation, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the New Jersey Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission.Recent projects include: Red Summer;Manifest;Schools for the Colored;Village of Peace: An African American Community in Israel;Small Towns, Black Lives; and others. A selection of images from the Manifest project are the subject of a Smithsonian Magazine article, “The Powerful Objects From the Collections of the Smithsonian’s Newest Museum” (in the Sept 2016 issue), dedicated to the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Aaron Turner
Aaron Turner is a photographer and educator currently based in Arkansas. He uses photography as a transformative process to understand the ideas of home and resilience in two main areas of the U.S., the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron also uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, blackness as material, and abstraction. Aaron received his
M.A. from Ohio University and an M.F.A from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He was a 2018 Light Work Artists-in-Residence at Syracuse University, 2019 EnFoco Photography Fellow, a 2020 Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Artists-in-Residence, a 2020 Artist 360 Mid-America Arts alliance Grant Recipient, the 2021 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Recipient, a 2021 Creators Lab Photo Fund recipient from Google’s Creator Labs & the Aperture Foundation, and 2022 Darryl Chappell Foundation photographer-in-residence at Ogden Museum of Southern Art.
Black Alchemy, Synopsis:
Most recently, in my practice, I am primarily concerned with constructing images that address abstraction, history, blackness as material, surveillance, artificial intelligence, the archive, and the metaphysics of race. Through my series Black Alchemy, I respond to internal questions about identity, representation, ontology, discursive enterprise, and the artists’ role in the studio space.
Yesterday Once More, Synopsis:
Since 2013, I have focused on portraits of my family and the Arkansas Delta residents(sometimes the Mississippi Delta). In recent pursuits of Yesterday Once More, I’ve focused on the landscape to reflect my relationship and understanding of the transformative process to understand place. The photographic medium is essential because it allows for radical and subtle changes, implying that the land has a dif erent sense of time than we do—a transformative experience of occupying and recording past, present, and future space simultaneously. I revisit places from memory to create photos that evoke vernacular signifiers such as churches, regional vegetation, architecture, and farming. All things that are fundamentally altered over time by neglect, revitalization, and economic forces. Each landscape element has a narrative unique to the Delta region, which elicits a sense of responsibility to record and preserve. Yesterday Once More, emphasizes the physical return to people and spaces previously inhabited. Lands native to my memory still profoundly impact my view of the world. My central concern is the passage of
time, human life, and how from one image to the next, time passes, life goes on, and the artist
https://www.aaronturner.studio
Third Thursdays is a monthly artist talk from the JKC Gallery. It is curated and moderated by artists, Heather Palacek and Habiyb Shu’Aib, and hosted by Michael Chovan-Dalton, Director of the JKC Gallery. The talks were started by Palacek and Shu’Aib as a platform for local artists to showcase their work to the Trenton and larger regional community and quickly reached an audience from New York to Philadelphia. Now our hybrid shows have regional and international artists and audiences.
-Michael Chovan-Dalton / JKC Gallery Director