Wendy S. Walters at Harvard Book Store
Grolier Bookshop, 6 Plympton Street, Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
Harvard Book Store welcomes Wendy S. Walters —associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University and author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal —for a discussion of her new book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint. About A Dead White An impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism traversing an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture, taking aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence reveals about our values. It’s hard to identify a material that takes up more sensory space and has received less critical examination than white paint. As the default color of our built environment, it asks us to believe that it’s neutral—that it has no signifiers or, perhaps more troublingly, that what it does signify, whether it be calmness, cleanliness, blankness, or purity, is unassailable and value-free. In this expansive, impassioned examination, cultural critic Wendy S. Walters interrogates all that we have taken for granted about the substance that colors, or fails to color, the structures and objects that surround us—and what the collective impulse toward…