Exhibits & Events

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Woodley White is attracted to the details, forms, objects, and colors of his everyday environment, which he painstakingly renders in drawings using crayon, colored pencil, and graphite. Striped shirts are an ongoing focus of his creative energy with a recent interest in pattern motifs, including smiley faces, polka dots, flowers, and letters. Reflecting his love of wearing oversize clothing, several works featured in Shirts of All Stripes are of unusually elongated or widened t-shirts. Taking the oversize t-shirt idea to another level, for the first time White presents brightly colored, monochromatic, larger-than-life-size t-shirt paintings, composed of sheets of paper taped together to form a paintable surface in the form of a shirt. A new series of crayon on photocopy prints underscores White’s attention to detail—in these works White hones in on the ribbed necks of t-shirts. Other drawn subjects included in the exhibition are subway train interiors, a mid-20th century tiled bathroom, the tiled support pillar of a subway station, a chest of drawers, a striped cup, and a spool of multi-colored yarn. White’s keen interest in detail is equally matched by repetition—the artist is known to draw variations on a subject hundreds of times. He often signs his drawings with a repeated +. White carries his drawings around in a plastic bag as he moves from home to studio, along with an assortment of personal items contained inside, hence the scuffs, smudges, folds, and wrinkles that accrue on the surfaces of his drawings, records of his daily journeys.

White (born 1983, lives and works in Philadelphia) has had solo exhibitions at SAGE Studio, Austin, TX; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; and Summertime, Brooklyn, NY. He has been in several group shows in Philadelphia-area venues including High5 Gallery, AIRSPACE, Savery Gallery, and Utility Works. White has shown internationally at Arts Project Australia, Melbourne.