Fine Art & Flowers – Amistad to Featuring Wendel A. White, Genealogical Chart with Hair

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art – Annual Fine Art & Flowers

Featuring Wendel A. White, Genealogical Chart with Hair

The Amistad Center for Art & Culture is honored to participate in this year’s Fine Art & Flowers celebration at The Wadsworth, highlighting Genealogical Chart with Hair from Wendel A. White’s acclaimed series Manifest | Thirteen Colonies.

The photograph references the pioneering scholarship of Caroline Bond Day, one of the first Black women to earn a graduate degree in physical anthropology from Radcliffe College in 1930. Founded in 1879 as a prestigious women’s liberal arts college and long affiliated with Harvard University (with which it formally merged in 1999), Radcliffe conferred upon Day the academic platform from which she would challenge dominant racial pseudoscience.

A scholar, writer, and educator with affiliations to leading HBCUs—including Clark Atlanta University, Howard University, North Carolina Central University, and Prairie View A&M University—Day’s research rigorously dismantled the racist assumptions embedded within early 20th-century eugenics and physical anthropology. Her genealogical studies affirmed the complexity and dignity of Black ancestry at a time when such scholarship was both radical and necessary.

The Floral Interpretation

The Amistad Center’s installation will accompany White’s photograph with an arrangement that evokes the expressive range of hair textures—coiled, braided, woven, and spiraled—symbolizing lineage, identity, and embodied memory. Interlaced within the design will be treasured family photographs contributed by Amistad staff, visually extending Day’s genealogical inquiry into the present.

This interpretive display serves three purposes:

1. Tribute – Honoring Caroline Bond Day’s intellectual courage and enduring legacy.
2. Celebration – Recognizing Wendel A. White’s brilliant photographic practice in Manifest | Thirteen Colonies, which re-centers Black presence in early American history.
3. Collaboration – Demonstrating the continued partnership between The Wadsworth and The Amistad Center in presenting scholarship-driven, community-rooted cultural programming.

Through this floral and photographic dialogue, Fine Art & Flowers becomes more than aesthetic pairing—it becomes an act of historical restoration, affirming that Black genealogies, textures, and intellectual traditions are foundational to the American narrative.