Austin Martin White

Austin Martin White, dissociation (casta), 2023

Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan)

Austin Martin White is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.

White’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.

White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New York in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery’s Upper East Side location in September 2023, alongside a simultaneous solo show at Derek Eller Gallery. White had his first solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel in Berlin in 2022. He has also shown in group exhibitions at And Now in Dallas, at Derek Eller Gallery in New York alongside artist Kathia St. Hilaire, as well as at T293 in Rome, Italy and at Y2K group in New York.

While a diversity of histories glints in the surfaces, tools, and imagery he employs (the colonial brutality underlying rubber extraction, to name another), White is simultaneously bent, it seems, on creative misuse, a kind of formal decolonization.

Martin Herbert, Artforum

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