University of Virginia Bayly Art Museum, October-December 23, 2004

A group exhibition exploring the identity politics of white culture in the United States. This exhibition approaches whiteness as being less about the color of skin and more about an ideology of power. This is the first museum exhibition to explore the cultural study of whiteness. All of the nearly 80 artworks selected were created between 1990 to the present. This limitation was set to be in accord with a particular development that occurs in the contemporary art world and academia in regard to theories of post-structuralism, post-colonial thought, and multiculturalism, from which the cultural study of whiteness arose in the 1990s.

From White to Whiteness
By Tyler Stallings

Whiteness, A Wayward Construction is an exhibition of work by twenty-eight contemporary individual artists and collaborative teams employing various media who explore representations of whiteness in the United States. The selection of artists is not restricted to whites but includes artists of various ethnicities. The exhibition is about the image of whiteness in the public imagination and in contemporary art; it is not an analysis of particular historical developments. It approaches whiteness as being less about the color of skin and more about an ideology of power. As the title indicates, the notion of waywardness is central to the exhibition and its conception of whiteness, referring both to the wayward, or capricious, power that whiteness confers and also to its ungovernability--the impossibility of pinning a single, overarching identity on any individual. The exhibition is divided into three overlapping categories that move from the general to the specific and are meant to suggest a movement from unawareness to reflection to problematizing the white as a racial subject.

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