Todd White’s paintings and sculptures are marked by the tension between order and chaos, the sensuality of pure marks on a pure surface, the dynamic relationships between shape and mark, line and color, gesture and rest. His work is a celebration of art’s mysterious power to create beauty from the materials of our existence.
A native of South Texas, Todd White was born in Corpus Christi in 1957. He has been making art since childhood. His interest in painting came at an early age when his father gave him a box of oil paints for Christmas when he was ten years old. At age thirteen he had begun to sell his paintings to local businesses in his hometown. Since then he has lived in such diverse places as Houston, Dallas, and Philadelphia, but now calls New York City home where he lives with his wife Alison McNeil Clark and their two children Teddy (born 1994) and Alice (born 1996).
Todd White’s work is included in many private collections including those of Bill Cosby, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Newman, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan (the former Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States), as well as numerous corporate collections including Unocal Corporation (California), MCI Communications Corporation (Washington DC), Bell Atlantic (New Jersey), Dow Corning
Todd White is an artist. He was born in 1966 in Englewood, Colorado. Todd is a painter and sculptor living and working in Denver, Colorado. Todd White’s work has been exhibited nationally, and his sculptures are represented in many private collections both nationally and internationally.
White currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado where he helped co-found the art collective called CAVE (Center of the American Visual Environment). Their first show was held at the former Gart gallery in Lower Downtown Denver (LoDo). The show featured the work of eight artists including: John DeAndrea, Tom Huck, Matt Mignanelli, Janna Saslawsky, Paul Rogers, Scott Swoveland, Jeff Washburne and Todd White. Since it’s inception CAVE has moved to a new location at 22nd & Lawrence Street in Denver.
He has been an active member of the Arts District on Santa Fe (ADSF) since it’s beginning. Todd was one of the original artists that helped establish this arts district which includes five galleries totaling approximately 4500 square feet of exhibition space as well as a large sculpture garden and live/work units for artists that are available for rent on a sliding scale. As part of ADSF Todd helped bring two art walks
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Todd White has been an active member of the contemporary art community since he moved to Los Angeles in 1969. He is known for his use of imagery from popular culture and his critical perspective on political and social issues.
A native of New York City, White received his undergraduate degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and later studied at the Art Students League, Parsons School of Design and the University of California at Los Angeles. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions, White participated in several group shows at major museums including a 1982 retrospective of his art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1995, he was honored by the National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts with their Lifetime Achievement Award.
White’s work is included in many major public collections including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; and The National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.
Todd White is a painter who has been focusing on the human figure for almost twenty-five years. He started painting when he was a student at the University of Georgia. In 1985, he moved to New York and began exhibiting his work. Since then, he has had over fifty solo shows and numerous group shows in the United States and abroad.
In 1999 White began teaching workshops on painting the human figure. His students range from novice painters to professional artists, as well as college art students. In addition to teaching workshops, Todd White continues to paint his own work in his studio in Brooklyn, New York.
White’s work has been described as figurative expressionism. He derives his figures from life as well as from the imagination-an amalgamation of the two-and they reflect his fascination with people and the world around him. The juxtaposition of saturated color against raw canvas is an integral part of his paintings, adding another dimension to them.
White’s style is distinguished by its boldness and simplicity, with an emphasis on line and color that evokes emotion and energy in the viewer.
Todd White is a sculptor whose work is distinguished by its focus on the figure. In his pieces, he explores notions of identity, ritual and spirituality.
In his early work, White was fascinated with the notion of transformation from one form to another. He created masks and figures that seemed to be in a constant state of metamorphosis or flux. In these pieces, he was interested in the way that the figures were connected to one another: they communicated with each other while they also stood alone. Each figure had a presence that suggested it could become something else at any moment.
White’s current work is focused on the individual as well as the public sphere. His most recent body of work consists of large-scale sculptures that are based on images culled from mass media sources. Included in this series are life-size clay figures of war protesters being arrested and naked bodies being shot by police officers — two acts that involve an imbalance of power between individuals and institutions. In these works, White explores the ways in which people have been publicly humiliated over time and how those memories have been recorded. The figures are rendered with a sense of immediacy in order to bring their suffering to life for the viewer. This work does not seek to provide answers, but rather asks viewers to
Let me tell you a story. A salamander lives in a pond and grows teeth. The teeth fall out and become fish. The fish get legs, crawl onto the land, and become reptiles. The reptiles lay eggs and become birds. The birds fly into space and become stars. There are no more salamanders in the pond, but they are in the sky now.
I’m making art to figure out what this means.
I’m not doing anything new here: I’ve read every book about art that I could find, from Kant to Duchamp, from Plato to Picasso. But I still don’t know what art is for or why it matters or how to do it or what its point is or how it can be justified or what it means or what the point of any of my art is, except that I’m trying to make something that doesn’t exist yet because no one has ever made it before, and even if someone else did it first, I want to do it better than anyone else has done it before because I want to matter, because if there’s any justice in this world then a small handful of people will care about my work enough to be bothered by whether or not I’m successful at making meaning out of this world
“On the surface, my art appears to be a “celebration of the mundane”, but these objects and environments that I make are actually a parody of the normalcy they mimic. In this way, they are an attempt at humor, not unlike the work of comedian Bo Burnham, whose comedy often includes what is perceived as profundity or wisdom in order to draw attention to the fact that most things people say and do are completely meaningless.”
