Office of Public Relations

Pomona, NJ 08240

 

Media Alert/Invitation to Cover

 

Stockton College to Confer Degrees at Annual Fall Commencement Ceremonies

 

Professor of Art, Wendel A. White, to Deliver Keynote Address

 

For Immediate Release

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Contact: Tim Kelly

Stockton Public Relations

(609) 652-4950

 

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, NJ The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey will conduct the Annual Fall Commencement Ceremonies on Sunday, December 18, 2005.

 

There will be two separate ceremonies. A special Hooding Ceremony for Masters degree candidates will take place from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. in the Stockton Performing Arts Center (M-Wing on the Pomona Campus.) The degree conferral ceremony for Bachelor degree candidates will be held at 1 p.m. in the Sports Center of the Pomona Campus. The Sports Center is located adjacent to parking lot 4, just off College Drive.

 

Stockton President Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. will present diplomas to approximately 629 bachelor degree candidates in five divisions of the College: Arts and Humanities, General Studies, Natural Science and Mathematics, Professional Studies, and Social and Behavioral Sciences. As of Friday morning the total included 592 Fall, and 120 Summer graduates. Additionally there will be 49 advanced degrees conferred: five Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies; 25 Master of Business Administration; 5 Master of Arts in Instructional Technology; 14 Master of Science in Occupational Therapy.

 

Wendel A. White, Professor of Art at Stockton, will deliver the keynote address.

Faculty Grand Marshal for the Processional will be Don Plank, Professor of Mathematics. Banner Carriers representing the divisions of the College include:

 

Jennifer Barr, Associate Professor of Business Studies for the Faculty; Associate Professor, Christine Tartaro, Director of the Mater of Arts in Criminal Justice for the Graduate Programs; student Kevin Williams for Arts and Humanities; Associate Professor of General Studies Ellen Mutari for General Studies; Daniel Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Biology for Natural Science and Mathematics; Charles Muller Adjunct Professor of Professional and Business Studies for Professional Studies; Andrea Guzman, student, for Social and Behavioral Sciences; and Donna Wanat, Director of Institutional Research, for the College.

 

Steven Couras, resident of Pomona, New Jersey, and President of the Student Senate, will deliver the student address. Couras will graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications Studies.

 

About Wendel White: Born in Newark, New Jersey and reared in New York City, Philadelphia and New Jersey, White was introduced to photography as a high school student at Montclair High School, Montclair, NJ. In 1979, he earned his BFA in photography from the School of the Visual Fine Arts in New York and in 1982 an MFA in photography from the University of Texas at Austin.

 

His work has been included in many museums and collections including individual and group exhibitions and publications. In January, 2003 the Noyes Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of the Small Towns, Black Lives project, including 13 years of the images and an exhibition catalogue of the same title. The exhibition will travel to various venues through December, 2006. He has received various awards and fellowships including the 1995 New Jersey Council for the Arts Fellowship, and the 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography.

 

White began teaching photography as a volunteer instructor for the high school art program operated within Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital; later he taught classes at the School for Visual Arts International Center for Photography and Cooper Union. In 1986, continuing to exhibit and produce new photographic works based on urban and industrial settings, he accepted a position on the faculty of The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

 

In 1993 he was elected to the Board of Directors for the Society for Photographic Education and served as its chair from 1996 to 1999. White served on the Kodak Educational Advisory Council from 1991 until 1994, and on various boards of cultural organizations in New Jersey, among them NJ Save Outdoor Sculpture, New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the Atlantic City Historical Museum.

 

At the Center for Creative Imaging in Maine, he began in 1991 to use the computer for artworks based on an earlier series of camera-manipulated landscapes. This interest in electronic media led to the creation of a Web-based presentation of the Small Towns,

 

Black Lives project that went online in 1995 as a Web site called The Cemetery (the images are now included in Small Towns, Black Lives at blacktowns.org). The site

included the photos and text from the Convergence exhibit plus hypertext links to images of the archival documents that were used to construct a narrative for the black community that no longer existed in Port Republic, NJ. His current project is an extension of Small Towns, Black Lives; the new project is called Schools for the Colored.

 

White is a resident of Galloway Township, New Jersey.

 

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