Friday, March 22–Friday, May 3, 2013

Philip Metz
iwishiwas, 2007
Digital C-print
38 x 27.5”

Curated by Hank Willis Thomas and Natasha L. Logan, White Boys charts the ways artists are aestheticizing white, male identity in the United States today. Privilege, invisibility, fear, anxiety, purity, emptiness, cowardice–whiteness and masculinity conjure an array of competing associations, emotions and imagery. Taken together, they present a perspective paradoxically ever-present and ever-absent: white is both the sum of all colors and no color at all. But how have whiteness and masculinity ‘evolved’ as relational constructs vis-a-vis blackness, femininity, and sexuality, modes of otherness that have often been scrutinized and alienated? Where are these terms’ entrenchments, and where do they become more pliant? Through photography, video, painting, printmaking and sculpture, the ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ artists of White Boys variously imagine male whiteness within this broader network of racial and sexual tropes and identities, marking seeming commonalities and more subtle gradations.

White Boys is made possible with the support of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Mellon Tri-College Creative Residencies Program. haverford.edu/hcah