Beyond the Frame

Hamiltonian Artists is pleased to present Lionel Frazier White III’s solo exhibition Beyond the Frame. Living in the wake of Washington, DC’s, ongoing gentrification and the whitewashing of Black communities built here, White finds his footing between the pages of Tina M. Campt’s Image Matters (2012), Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments (2019), and Brandi Thompson Summers’ Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (2019).

Written by Black women scholars, each text offers theoretical examinations of both historical and contemporary Black subjectivity within urban/metropolitan contexts, particularly in relation to gender and class. The body of work presented reflects White’s meditation on such critical theories, centering his mother and the re-memory of her lived experiences as a young Black woman coming of age in 1970s and ’80s Washington, DC.

White splices images from his family photo archive, reconfiguring them in the foreground of collages, videos, and mixed media works methodically washed with white paint. In doing so, White attempts to intimately recontextualize a time that is often reduced to pathologized data and stigmatized historical archives. The resulting compositions reckon with her radical aspirations and ruptured pursuits toward belonging—all the while complicating the approachability of family photography and calling attention to the aesthetic qualities and increased fugitivity of Black public–private life. Beyond the Frame serves as an extended portrait of White’s mother and the familial legacy she has inspired—one that lives on beyond the frame of the image, despite DC’s long history of leveraging progress against Black life.

Artist

Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, DC; lives and works in Washington, DC) earned his BFA from the George Washington University, Washington, DC (2018).