WHITE | Balance

WHITE | Balance

Arlington Weithers

SEPTEMBER 11 – DECEMBER 8, 2023

MAIN AND MEZZANINE GALLERIES

The exhibition WHITE | Balance is centered on six recent large-scale paintings, some exceeding twenty feet in length, by Guyanese-born, New York-based artist Arlington Weithers. Five of these works belong to the Black artist’s “white” series, which are a departure from Weithers’ signature paintings, where assertive color and surfaces predominate. (The “white paintings” will be joined by a catalyst painting, Fire Next Time, and five precursor works.) However, the white that supplants hue in the ambitious “white” paintings is rich and variegated, with reflectance from flat to iridescent – a subtly tinted spring thaw range of whiteness – which reveals an extended gamut of what the eye will accept as “white.” While often suppressing Weithers’ demonstrable facility with saturated color, they are perhaps the most complex works of the artist’s career. Ultimately, it is not the absence of color, but the simultaneity of all color in “white,” that is embodied in these works. Weithers’ paintings provide a truly immersive, ravishing experience of scale, surface, contrast, subtlety and complexity. But they also have other things to disclose about “whiteness.”

“White balance” in photography and digital imaging is a setting that establishes a baseline of “true” white under different lighting conditions. However, human perception subconsciously accommodates the “imbalanced” light of blue shadows or of the setting sun as it strikes a white surface. So we subjectively sense “‘white” even where it’s not indicated by the absence of hue, and we balance our perception, our view of the world, from a skewed white-as-neutral set-point. And then this sense of whiteness expands, becoming a pervasive socio-political “white noise,” in which every “frequency” or color is present, but often merely sensed without being fully perceived (this, while non-white people are never permitted the luxury of not considering their non-whiteness). But in Weithers’ generous work, we are invited to immerse in whiteness, revel in whiteness as a painterly, sensual, tactile, chromatic, aesthetic experience, while also gaining important understandings of white as amalgam and as metaphor, and of whiteness as Other in Arlington Weithers’ span of work. White, in this selection of paintings, is a coalescence; composite, mutable, ineluctable, and encompassing.

Arlington Weithers was born in Guyana in 1948 and arrived in the US in 1969. He studied at the Art Students League in New York in 1970-71. With a full scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, he studied with William T. Williams and visiting artist Claes Oldenberg in 1973. He later received a BFA from Brooklyn College in 1974, where he studied again with Williams, and Philip Pearlstein. Weithers lectured, conducted art therapy workshops and painted murals as an Artist-in-Residence for the City of Dallas, Texas, in 1980-81. Weithers also began working with digital imaging technologies at their inception and is a master digital printer. He received a grant to support a digital art exhibition at Auburn University, Alabama, in 1994, the state’s first. Weithers was an artist in residence at Cohs Jiy’ Mazunte, Mexico, in 2003-2004

His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at: Brooklyn College-CUNY, NY,1973 & 1974; Stage One Gallery, Dallas, TX,1981; Foy Union Gallery, “What is Black Art” Auburn University, AL, 1990;  A Topography of Color, The Armory Gallery, Montgomery, AL,, 1990; The Atrium at Auburn Ave, Atlanta, GA,1991; Booker T. Washington Art Gallery, Tuskegee, AL, 1993; Digital Visions, Biggins Gallery, Auburn University, AL, 1994; EL Museo de Mazunte, Mazunte, Mexico, 2004; Recent Paintings, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY, 2004; Paintings From the Mazunte Series, AFP Galleries, NY, 2006; and Arlington Weithers: Organic: Imagery and Processes Inspired by the Natural World, at the David Richard Gallery, NY, in the spring of 2023.

Beginning in 1970 Weithers’ paintings and photography have been featured in many group exhibitions, including: The Young Professionals, Light Gallery, NY, 1976; Recent Works: Artist-in-Residence for the City of Dallas, Dallas City Hall Gallery, 1981; S & L Gallery, FIAC Exposition in Grand Palais, Paris, 1984 & 1985; Caribbean-American Heritage, Pier 3, San Francisco, 1986; The Definitive Decade, Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, 1993

Through My Window, the Anchorage Museum of History & Art, Anchorage, 1993-94; Spacescapes, The University of Helsinki, The 5th International Symposium on Electronic Art,1994; The Red Clay Survey,  Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Southern Art, Huntsville Museum of Art,1994; The Unbroken Circle, The State Art Council Gallery, Montgomery, 1995; Digital Dreams, the Newcastle College Gallery, England, 1995; ArCade 1, Wakefield College of Art, England, 1996; The Valentine Project, City Without Walls, Newark, 1996; Digital Creativity The London Print Workshop, 1997; Black NY Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Collections, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY,1999; Benefit Exhibition and Auction, MOMENTA ART and White Columns Gallery, NY, 2000;

A Different Vision, Danny Simmons’s Corridor Gallery, NY, 2003; Open House: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, 2004; Recent Acquisitions, Ogden Museum, New Orleans, 2006; The World in Brooklyn, Selections from the Brooklyn Museum, New York State Museum, Albany, NY, 2005-06; Recent Work: Tougalo Art Colony Instructors, Tougalo College Art Gallery, Jackson, MS, 2008 & 2009; Recent Work: Arlington Weithers & Matt Freedman, Five Myles,  Brooklyn, 2010; Rhythm, Color And Lore, Clover’s Fine Art Gallery, Brooklyn, 2011; Contemporary Expressions: Art From The Guyana Diaspora, Five Myles, Brooklyn, 2011; Timehri Transitions: Expanding Concepts in Guyana Art, Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House, NY, 2013; I Kan Do Dat, Rush Arts, Skylight Gallery & Salena Gallery-L.I. University, NY, 2014; Liminal Space, Caribbean Cultural Center-African Diaspora Institute, NY, 2017.

Weithers’ work is included in the collections of: Pegasus International Hotel, Guyana; Brooklyn College Student Union, (CUNY), NY; The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY; The Anchorage Museum of History & Art, AK; Tubman Museum, Macon, GA; Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Ogden Museum, New Orleans, LA; The Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE.