A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint
A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint
Wendy S. Walters
Wendy S. Walters
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. An impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our values.
It’s hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than white paint. As the default color of our built environment, it asks us to believe that it’s neutral—that it has no signifiers or, perhaps more troublingly, that what it does signify, whether it be calmness, cleanliness, blankness, or purity, is unassailable and value-free. In this expansive, impassioned examination, cultural critic Wendy S. Walters interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us—and what the collective impulse toward white paint can tell us about culture, politics, and individual desire.
Tracing the unquantifiable impact of white paint on our lived environment and in our collective imaginary, A Dead White braids together multiple narrative threads and associations. Exploring the role of white paint in art history, architecture, and consumer culture, it follows its influence into the home, the halls of the workplace, the galleries and studios of the contemporary art world, and larger forums of mass culture and national identity, never losing sight of how this cultural inclination manifests in our choices and habits as individuals. Deeply investigated and anchored by Walters’s immediate sensory experiences and instincts, her intelligence and lucid prose ground this encompassing, utterly fresh work of cultural criticism.
Literary Arts, Literary Nonfiction
2020
About Wendy S. Walters
New York, NY
Wendy S. Walters is an author whose work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and lyric essays to explore themes of race, gender, environment, and belonging in America. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, and The Huffington Post. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Walters has received fellowships from Mass MoCA, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Smithsonian Institution, and Bread Loaf. She was an artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for the opera, Golden Motors with composer, Derek Bermel. Walters was a founding director of the public humanities inquiry Essay in Public, and her work has been published in The Yale Review, BOMB, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, and Harper’s among many others.
Wendy S. Walters is an author whose work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and lyric essays to explore themes of race, gender, environment, and belonging in America. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, and The Huffington Post. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Walters has received fellowships from Mass MoCA, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Smithsonian Institution, and Bread Loaf. She was an artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for the opera, Golden Motors with composer, Derek Bermel. Walters was a founding director of the public humanities inquiry Essay in Public, and her work has been published in The Yale Review, BOMB, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, and Harper’s among many others.