Vagner Mendonça Whitehead

Vagner Mendonça Whitehead is an artist, activist, educator, and academic leader. His art practice encompasses traditional and new media, curatorial projects, community engagements, and creative writing. These expressions display accidental and forced intersections of personal experiences, histories, current events, geo-locations, languages, and found artifacts, presented in group and solo exhibitions in art galleries, community centers, and museums, as well as film and video festivals, nationally (AZ, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, MA, ME, MI, NE, NJ, NY, NM, OH, OR, PA, TX, VT, and WI) and internationally (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cuba, Cyprus, England, Germany, India, Mexico, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates).

Past art projects dealt with metaphorical representations of fear and violence (Color Coded), aging and technological obsolescence (Generations), and imprisoned young brown bodies (Children in Cages). Current projects present a memorialization of longing and loss (SP/SW), combine meditation and active listening with anti-racist literature temporalized through craft (Left Listening), and merges the history of pigments as pertaining to colonialism, family migratory routes, the photographic archive, and surface scarification (Nau/now).

Much like his role as an educator, Vagner’s creative process happens through juxtapositions, exchanges, and group facilitations, where he learns just as much, if not more, from those who generously decide to share their time and perspectives with him, and others. Ultimately, making space is as important as making.