Photography Exhibition - Segregated Influences

The Colorado Photographic Arts Center is pleased to present Segregated Influences, an exhibition that explores the complex history of race in America through the photographs of Wendel White, Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University, and Tya Alisa Anthony, a Denver-based visual artist.

In Schools for the Colored, White photographs the architectural remains of structures once used as segregated schools for African Americans in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The exhibition presents 20 black-and-white images of school buildings that appear isolated from their surrounding landscapes, which are obscured from view using digital techniques. This technique is a representation of W.E.B. DuBois’ famous concept of “the veil,” a metaphor for the divide that separates the lives of black and white Americans.

Anthony’s ongoing series, Complexion, confronts the results of colorism perpetuated within the history of the media. Colorism, distinct from racism, involves discrimination against persons based on skin tone, regardless of their perceived racial identity.

Drawing from the archives of the historically African-American lifestyle digest, Jet Magazine, Anthony investigates the contrast between images published in the 1950s and today.

“Unlike today’s Jet Magazine filled with wealthy black celebrities of various skin tones, in the 1950s they printed much fairer skinned women of color with European-inspired hairstyles and created a complex relationship between what was ‘acceptable’ and reality,” writes Anthony.

The exhibition includes 13 images of figures from Jet that Anthony has manipulated digitally, printed, then physically altered, asking the viewer to consider the cultural complexities of the black experience.

Although each artist takes a vastly different approach, both artists use the power of photography to illuminate America’s complex history of race in ways that can help increase our understanding of social conditions today.