Shelley White

As an interdisciplinary artist working in socially engaged practice, I am drawn to issues that seem most intractable: colonialism, neoliberal globalization, structural racism, border politics, militarism, climate crisis. I am compelled by our popular narratives – how the stories we tell can distance us from responsibility, neatly excusing reproductions of power. At the same time, I am inspired by visual languages that challenge and shift narratives, and by the centrality of art in the history of social movements and social change.

I use experimental practices with visual arts and creative writing to grapple with identity, complicity, and the complexities of existing within—and resisting—a world that renders people and planet disposable. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, mixed media collage, and sculpture with found, natural, and discarded materials, I create multi-layered compositions and installations that explore the seen and unseen. Collaborating with community partners, I co-vision murals, facilitate participatory memorial sculpture, craft collaborative poetry and script writing and reading, and engage in art as activist intervention. At my core, I see art as a practice that builds community to process collective loss, reveal systems of inequity, contend honestly with our histories and complicities, build mutual accountability, and imagine new possibilities. While providing space to metabolize and transform grief and alienation, I offer counternarratives of hope, humanization, and systems change.

My solo exhibition, Landscapes and Lives Partitioned: Witnessing the Borderlands builds upon my community-engaged practice in immigration and environmental justice in the southern Arizona/northern Sonora borderlands, depicting the history, harms and potential for hope amid border militarization. Auspicious Pernicious Beginnings explores New England’s history of settler colonialism through the stories of my maternal colonial ancestors, grappling with memory, grief, and revisionist historical narratives.