ANTHONY WHITE

Seattle, USA

@culturalcrisis

ANTHONY WHITE portrait

Bio

Anthony White is an artist, curator, and advocate, and a board member of Artist Trust, On The Boards, and the Lillian Miller Foundation, an organization dedicated to advancing educational opportunities for LGBTQIA+ youth. He received a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in 2018 and is represented by Greg Kucera Gallery.

He has received multiple grants and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2025–2030), Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award (2021), the Neddy at Cornish Painting Award (2020), and the Artist Trust Fellowship Award (2020). In 2024, Seattle Magazine named him one of the city’s “Most Influential People.” Anthony has presented solo exhibitions at Greg Kucera Gallery (2018, 2020, 2023, 2025), Public Gallery, London (2019), Seattle Art Museum (2022), and Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University (2022). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Art in Embassies, Bridgetown, Barbados (2024); New Narratives in Contemporary College, Valladolid, Spain (2024); The Artist is Online at Koenig Galerie, Berlin (2021); and Queer Visibility at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2021), among others.

Anthony White’s work is collected internationally, and is in the permanent collections of the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Seattle Art Museum; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Sinegal Center for Science and Innovation, Seattle; among others. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Statement

Influenced by 16th- and 17th-century Dutch vanitas paintings, I explore the interactions between objects and their environments, and people and their surroundings. My work seeks to capture the essence of the mundane while offering nuanced and often overlooked interpretations of the world.

I reframe painting’s relationship with technology, blurring the boundaries between painting and digital process-based practices by building compositions that weave ubiquitous objects, technological motifs, and historical and literary allusions to reflect the complexities of contemporary life. These layered narratives explore how objects interact with their environments, how seemingly mundane moments carry deeper significance, and how our existence is mediated through digital and consumerist culture. Beyond the frequently visited “ready-made” discourse, my work examines the aesthetic and conceptual consequences of screen culture, mass production, and human agency in the Anthropocene.

While I respect the history of painting, my practice seeks to disrupt its traditions. I reappropriate Poly-Lactic Acid, a biodegradable material largely absent from painting’s historical canon, as my primary medium. By manually extruding strands of PLA through a pen-like tool, I engage in an intricate, labor-intensive process that contrasts the mass production methods used to manufacture the objects I depict. The tension between the handmade and the industrial, and the physical and the digital, challenge conventional understandings of materiality, representation, and authorship in contemporary painting.

Though there is no term that categorizes my specific process, I consider myself a painter. By expanding the material and conceptual boundaries of my medium, I invite viewers to reconsider painting’s evolving role in contemporary art, as well as the objects that define individual and collective identities. By intertwining an abundance of revered and banal icons and symbols that camouflage an absolute, my work fosters a renegotiation of how we engage with, submit to, or challenge society and the world around us.

Limited Edition Prints

In the artist's own words

“False Starts is one of seven works created at Kolaj Fest, in New Orleans, using shared and found materials from their archive. Each piece carries a sense of immediacy and explores acts of revealing and concealing, meaning and ambiguity, communication and disruption.”
A.B.

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In the artist's own words

""The page’s text is largely blacked out, redacted, and obscured, with “the begin” visible as the only legible phrase besides the title. Bright, primary colors on fabric evoke sheets, balloons, or the parachute game from childhood gym classes, while small feet poking out below. What does growing up look like as an adult? What memories persist, which are covered over, and which do we seek to recreate? Growing Up (You) is one of seven works created at Kolaj Fest, in New Orleans, using shared and found materials from their archive. Each piece carries a sense of immediacy and explores acts of revealing and concealing, meaning and ambiguity, communication and disruption."

Original Artworks

In the artist's own words

“Granny Squares, from my Fictions: Periodicals series, is a crochet magazine that has undergone a process of tearing apart, layering, and reassembling. The photographic imagery allows me to blur the boundary between image and object, inviting viewers to move between reading it as actual yarn or as fragments of yarn photographs. I call these works image-objects: readable as paintings, yet physical as sculptural forms.

I am drawn to knitting and crochet books from the 1970s and ’80s, as well as other craft publications. These were magazines that surrounded me as a child, and I was captivated not only by their colors and patterns, but also by the sense of possibility they offered — the idea that you could create almost anything from the simple materials listed. Revisiting them allows me to transform these memories back into the very material from which they were made.” A.B.

In the artist's own words

“Infinite Torment (Inferno)’ stands apart within my ‘Fictions’ series as a book whose narrative is part of our collective imagination—shaping how we conceive of hell itself—as opposed to the remnants and forgotten books I typically revive in the series. Though its status as a gift and companion to an earlier piece, Dante’s ‘Purgatory,’ gave me license to bend the usual rules of the series, it is the fact that the concepts of hell were largely created by a writer in the 14th century—not the Bible—a fact both fascinating and continually relevant in our religion-focused world, that led to this particular exception." A.B.

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"Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different."

David Hockney
in conversation with Paul Joyce.
1988