Artist's Project: Wendy Ewald
Written by Julie Bernson, Director of Education and Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Photography and Art After 1950
 |
©Wendy Ewald (born 1951)
Q from A White Girls Alphabet, 2002
chromogenic print
courtesy of the artist |
For almost thirty years, artist Wendy Ewald has challenged traditional notions of documentary photography and the role of the artist. Exploring the visual imagination of children and adults around the world, her collaborative approach to photography probes questions of identity and cultural differences.
In 1997 Ewald embarked on a project entitled American Alphabets, designed to look at written language from various cultural perspectives. Each of the four alphabets in the series was created through residency projects working with museums and schools in different parts of the country. A White Girls Alphabet was made in 2001-2002 when Ewald was the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence at Phillips Academy. Throughout the course of the year the artist worked with twenty female students from Adams Hall dormitory to collaborate on the alphabet. Starting with discussions of the cultural implications of alphabet books and the use of language at Abbot and Phillips Academies, they explored the changes in language used specifically by girls and women since the 1800s.
The girls worked together to come up with lists of words to represent each letter of the alphabet, keeping the idea – however fraught with contradictions – of the moniker “white girls alphabet.” After deciding on a word for each letter, they worked with Ewald to determine the set-up for a photograph to illustrate each word. They then wrote definitions of their words and sentences using the words in the particular context relevant to the students. They also wrote the letter and word on each negative in their own handwriting to further signal the personal nature of the selected words and images.
A White Girls Alphabet, along with Ewald’s A Spanish Alphabet, 1997 and An African American Alphabet, 2000, are currently on exhibition at the Addison through December 31. This exhibition has been generously funded by the Winton Family Exhibition Fund.
The goal of the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Program at the Addison Gallery of American Art is to create meaningful interactions between artists and students. Since its inception, the program has brought together thousands of students and more than fifty acclaimed artists, including Robert Frank, Judith Joy Ross, Abelardo Morell, Wendy Ewald, Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Nari Ward, Allison Saar, Lee Mingwei, Kerry James Marshall and Sue Williams.
