Wendy S. Walters and Margo Jefferson discuss the prevalence of white paint in shaping our subconscious understanding of our built world.About this Event
Join us for a conversation with Wendy S. Walters to celebrate her new book, a brilliant and razor-sharp work of cultural criticism examining what we take for granted with the abundance of white paint. She will be in conversation with Margo Jefferson, followed by a signing.
PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.
Can't attend?(please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
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 values
It's 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 it's neutral--that 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 us--and 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 Walters's immediate sensory experiences and instincts, her intelligence and lucid prose ground this encompassing, utterly fresh work of cultural criticism.
Wendy S. Walters is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, Troy, Michigan, and A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Yale Review, BOMB, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships from Creative Capital, The Architectural League of New York, NYFA, and Mass MoCA. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she cocurated the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, which was called “a master class in presenting complicated, troubling art.” She is an associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Photo Credit: Claire Holt
Margo Jefferson is a memoirist and critic. She has published three books: Constructing a Nervous System, Negroland, and On Michael Jackson. She has been a staff critic for The New York Times and Newsweek, and her reviews have been widely published and anthologized. She received a Pulitzer Prize for her criticism, a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, and a Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction. She teaches at Columbia University.
Event venue
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
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