WIDEWALLS: ESTEBAN WHITESIDE ON HIS LATEST GROUP SHOW AT ALLOUCHE GALLERY
JUNE 16, 2021
For his curatorial debut, author and art historian Charles Moore presents Operation Varsity Blues, running through July 4th at Allouche Gallery. The exhibition is named after the U.S. Attorney's investigation of the 2019 college admissions scandal, where many affluent white American families were prosecuted for bribing a slew of Ivy League institutions and their gatekeepers of admission through the loopholes of their athletics departments. While Affirmative Action has grown to be constantly challenged as an unfair advantage, admissions at these institutions for Black and Brown students have declined due to the underbelly of white privilege which has finally come to a head.
I sat down with D.C. based painter Esteban Whiteside, who is one of twelve artists exhibiting at Operation Varsity Blues, to hear his perspective on the scandal and the works he has included.The College Admissions Scandal
Storm Ascher: Your work is known to jump right into controversy. What brought you to working with this concept of the college admissions scandal?
Esteban Whiteside: Charles Moore contacted me six months ago, and asked if I had any work dealing with this. I told him I didn't have any at the time, but it was something that I definitely thought to do something about. Fast forward a few months, he started sending me articles about the student admission scandal, and really, I just knew the story from the surface. So a lot of the stuff that he was sending me gave me a new perspective on it, and just showed the depths of how far this actually goes. It goes all the way back to pre-school.
SA: Can you elaborate on that? What was Charles sending you that made it deeper for you?
EW: He was sending me articles showing the rates that African Americans get accepted into these Ivy League schools, and how this whole race to get into good schools starts as early as pre-K. I read an article where a woman sued a program because she said her child’s pre-K class wasn’t doing enough to prepare them for NYC’s competitive school system. Then a whole other side of it was athletics. Personally, I'm really into sports, and I played basketball in college. So, to see that there were students getting into school who never played a sport in their lives was shocking. Especially because of how limited spots are to begin with. The thought of some rich kid taking the spot on a roster that could go to someone far more deserving is appalling.
Operation Varsity Blues
SA: So getting into the two works you’ve included in the show. The first being Last Question Got Me, 2021, depicting end of a multiple choice test with doodles all over it. It’s been graded that the answer they’ve selected is wrong. And you’ve indicated the least likely answer is the right answer: Black student with a 4.0 GPA and a 1500 LSAT score.
EW: With this piece I wanted to show how even when you do everything right and at the highest level, money could still outweigh those merits. I answered the question on the piece like I would have answered it prior to doing my research on the student admission scandal. In doing research for this piece I learned that ALDC’s (Athletes, Legacy student, Kids of Major Donors, Children of faculty) make up a very large percentage of all admissions into colleges in an already competitive field—leaving even less room for students of color. The snake represents the corruption and power of people he is competing with for college admission and the new reality that money can overshadow all he has honestly worked for.
SA: I’ve noticed the superman S’s that are in many of your paintings, is this an important symbol to you and what are you referencing when you include them in the piece?
EW: Yeah, it goes back to me doodling in elementary and high school. Before I started painting I went by Stephen. So I always doodled the S on everything. And my wife now was my girlfriend at the time when I was in elementary school, so I always put S&G on a lot of my work. In a lot of my work I want it to be me unlearning all the stuff that I learned growing up, and then I'm re-tackling a lot of these issues and the true meaning behind them. That was the whole idea behind my test prep series.
SA: And how does this connect to your other piece in the show, the Ameritocracy 101?
EW: I wanted the pieces to work well with each other. So the test prep piece is something that I felt might be in that classroom of Ameritocracy 101.
SA: Why is the teacher crying?
EW: The teacher is crying because he is now forced to teach his students about all they are up against in the world of college admissions and because the corruption is and will always exist. He is preparing them. He can no longer teach that we are rewarded on merits alone, so this new course teaches about the side and back doors into college. On the chalkboard it says “My eyes had a gleam once” and that is to show that times have changed and more and more control goes to the rich and powerful and less and less to the teachers and institutions. It also says in even bigger letters, “The bag is a terrible thing to waste”. This is suggesting that safety net might be some money and not your hard work. This is not how I personally feel, but just to represent the lost hope of the teacher in the education system.
SA: Yeah, when I heard about the college admissions scandal, and everybody reporting on it, to me I thought, how is this news? Maybe I’m a cynic but I was not surprised at all.
EW: Yeah, I mean, I definitely knew but not to the extent that parents and kids go for admission in to all levels of education. The Background and Influences
SA: Can you talk about your school background?
EW: I grew up right outside of Asheville, North Carolina. There were only a handful Black kids in the whole school. But it was a public school and education was pretty shitty in our hometown. There wasn't a lot of competition in the area where we came from. So a lot of this idea of getting into the “right” high school wasn't even a thing to us. We were out in the country. We only had one school.
SA: Do you think that growing up in a white space informs your work now?
EW: Yeah, a lot of times and I think that's kind of why I started doing these types of pieces where I'm going back into school and and relearning certain things. I feel that in a lot of my work I’m sending messages back to a lot of the racist folks I grew up around and who still live in my hometown. I want to troll some of them in my work.
SA: What was the transition like for you moving to D.C.?
EW: I was over flooded with information that I never had access to. All there was to do was sports, so it wasn't until I was out of college when I looked around wondering why things are the way they are. It was a breath of fresh air moving to D.C. All the art and culture—the galleries—there wasn't one single art gallery in my hometown. And definitely no Black artists being shown. So just being in D.C. and being able to see all the art played a major role in my development.
SA: Yeah, when I think of D.C., I think of a cookie cutter way of looking at democracy because you're close to the White House and government buildings. So I wonder if that informs your work to be constantly thinking about political issues?
EW: Definitely. I worked at a political magazine up here for five years. And that was where a lot of my ideas came from, listening to the writers and what they were like doing research on. So it played a big role in my work. Also the way that I write titles on a lot of my paintings, It reminds me of a magazine cover. Catchy headlines to grab the viewers’ attention. And then you can come in and break down what the rest of the work is about.
Interview conducted by Storm Ascher.
