Wendy S. Walters – författare

A critical reexamination of Carpeaux’s bust Why Born Enslaved! and other nineteenth-century antislavery images—this book interrogates the treatment of the Black figure as a malleable political symbol and locus of exoticized beautyThis critical reexamination of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s iconic bust Why Born Enslaved! unpacks the sculpture’s complex and sometimes contradictory engagement with an antislavery discourse. Noted art historians and writers discuss how categories of racial difference grew in popularity in the nineteenth century alongside a crescendo in cultural production in France during the Second Empire. By focusing on Why Born Enslaved! and comparing it to works by Carpeaux’s contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to objects by twenty-first-century artists Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, this volume explores such key themes as the portrayal of Black enslavement and emancipation; the commodification of images of Black figures; the role of sculpture in generating the sympathies of its audiences; and the relevance of Carpeaux’s sculpture to legacies of empire. The book also provides a chronology of events central to the histories of transatlantic slavery, abolition, colonialism, and empire.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(March 10, 2022–March 5, 2023)

An impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our valuesIts hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than white paint. As the default color of our built environment, it asks us to believe that its neutralthat it has no signifiers or, perhaps more troublingly, that what it does signify, whether it be calmness, cleanliness, blankness, or purity, is unassailable and value-free. In this expansive, impassioned examination, cultural critic Wendy S. Walters interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround usand what the collective impulse toward white paint can tell us about culture, politics, and individual desire. Tracing the unquantifiable impact of white paint on our lived environment and in our collective imaginary, A Dead White braids together multiple narrative threads and associations. Exploring the role of white paint in art history, architecture, and consumer culture, it follows its influence into the home, the halls of the workplace, the galleries and studios of the contemporary art world, and larger forums of mass culture and national identity, never losing sight of how this cultural inclination manifests in our choices and habits as individuals. Deeply investigated and anchored by Walterss immediate sensory experiences and instincts, her intelligence and lucid prose ground this encompassing, utterly fresh work of cultural criticism.