Artist Statement 

Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead is an artist, educator, and academic leader. His art practice encompasses traditional and newer media, community projects, and creative writing that present accidental and forced intersections of personal experiences, histories, current events, geo-locations, languages, and found artifacts, presented in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums, as well as film and video festivals, nationally and internationally. 

Past art projects dealt with metaphorical representations of fear and violence (Color Coded), aging and technological obsolescence (Generations), and imprisoned young brown bodies (Children in Cages). Recent projects present a memorialization of longing and loss during a global pandemic, combine meditation and active listening with anti-racist literature temporalized through craft (Left Listening), and display an alternative to Zoom fatigue and queering communing (Titled Video Stills). His current research combines the history of pigments as pertaining to colonialism, family migratory routes, the photographic archive, and surface scarification (Nau/now).