Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, video, installation, social practice
Website: lindseywhiteprojects.net
Lindsey White was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BFA in Photography from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and an MFA in Photography from the California College of the Arts in Oakland. She is represented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco. She was the 2017 SECA Award winner from SFMOMA. Her projects are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art Library and the Portland Art Museum.
White was an Associate Professor and Photography Department Chair at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2010 until the school’s closure in 2022 — a loss that has become a significant subject of her recent work. She was Director of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023, and was the Arthur & Carol Goldberg Visiting Curator and Artist in Residence at Hunter College Art Galleries in New York in 2025. She is a co-founder, with Jordan Stein and David Kasprzak, of ‘Will Brown’ — a para-curatorial experiment that has mounted exhibitions and events at their Mission District storefront and organized ten offsite exhibitions with Bay Area institutions, mining unexpected histories within artistic and cultural spheres. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, The New Yorker, KQED Arts, the SF Chronicle, and Charlotte Cotton’s book Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015).
White works in photography, video, sculpture, and social practice, using the languages of magic, comedy, and theater to challenge ordinary perceptions — presenting the unexpected and impossible as a mode of philosophical inquiry. Like a good joke, her work pits cartoonish occurrence against the mundane physicality of everyday life: a woman sawing herself in half; an oversized red ball balanced on a staircase; a trick that almost works, and its failure. Through video, photography, and sculpture, she models what one curator called “a type of site gag index” — a catalogue of impossible situations whose formal precision and deadpan presentation asks serious questions about illusion, truth, and what we agree to believe. Her recent practice has expanded into more explicitly institutional and educational territory: Fantastico! (2024) at Casemore Gallery was an elegy for the San Francisco Art Institute, staging the ghostly remnants of the closed school as both document and critique; Last Art School (2025) at Hunter College was an immersive, community-centered exhibition and program series staging an art school as a site of generosity, free lunch, and collective inquiry.
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