Past Recipient 2003: Angela White

Garbology: Fiber, Fluff and Fuzz
Part of: Spring Season originally on view February 21, 2003 - May 11, 2003

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and curated by Emily Hall Tremaine Curatorial Fellow, Frank G. Spicer III.

In her first solo museum exhibition—the fifth artist in the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series recognizing women artists under the age of thirty from the Northeast Ohio region–Angela White creates glamorous wearable garments and awesome architectural sculptures from the detritus of our consumer culture.

Using blue plastic grocery bags, twisty ties, orange peel, cassette tape and umbrellas, she creates sculptural garments that evoke the haute couture of the Parisian runways. In Garbology—Fiber, Fluff and Fuzz, White also features her architectural sculpture of a life-sized house comprised of nearly one thousand recycled telephone books she selected and collected.

Angela White has had a long and varied obsession with trash. In Garbology – Fiber, Fluff and Fuzz, White transforms trash into treasure and, in doing so, transforms herself, an artist, into a sort of anthropologist who examines our culture through its garbage. She converts mundane, discarded objects collected from sojourns into the bustling Piazza San Marco in Italy and walks along Northeast Ohio’s Little Cuyahoga River, into imaginative sculptural works. Turning old umbrella into dresses, caution tape into a gentleman’s suit or yellow page phone books into sculptures, White subtly invites the museum-goer to rethink their preconceived distinctions between what is refuse and what is art.