Jeff Whetstone’s
Professor Jeff Whetstone’s photographs and films imagine America through the lenses of anthropology and mythology. Whetstone’s Post-Pleistocene series illuminates the depths of wild caves in Alabama and Tennessee, where layers of human markings reveal millennia of cultural evolution. His ongoing New Wilderness project portrays a human-centric American wilderness and questions how our cultural connection to the wild is shown in contemporary times. Whetstone’s artwork investigates the role gender, geography, and heritage play in defining the human position in the natural world. A self-described biologist at heart, Whetstone explores the cyclical and evolving narrative of landscapes that are not merely a setting for human activity but a force that compels humans to adapt. His work varies considerably with each project, but he always addresses the particularities of a place and explores the interplay between geography and human experience. For Whetstone, the natural world is a cultural experience, and the built environment is firmly, yet problematically, situated within the web of nature.
Throughout his academic career, Whetstone has received numerous prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His work has been exhibited internationally and has received reviews in ArtForum, Art in America, Frieze, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Whetstone first exhibited video work in 2011 when his experimental narrative short, On the Use of Syrinx, premiered at the Moving Image Festival in New York. A second exhibition in 2011 at Julie Saul Gallery titled Seducing Birds, Snakes, and Men introduced Whetstone’s work in animation and video to a broad audience. Whetstone earned his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Photography in 2001, where he received the George Sakier Prize for Photography. His work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nasher Museum, the Nelson Atkins Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum, the Yale Art Gallery, the New York Public Library, and many others.
Whetstone was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and entered Duke University as a Mathematics major. He describes his long arc from the Sciences to Art as an effort to complete a circle. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Zoology and a certificate in Film Studies, Whetstone took a position as an artist-in-residence at Applashop, a documentary arts cooperative in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. He worked for the local paper, where he may have been one of the only journalists in the nation to use an antique large-format view camera. After receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Yale in 2001, Whetstone was appointed lecturer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was named full professor at U.N.C. in 2012. Whetstone joined the Princeton faculty as Professor of Photography in 2015 and was appointed Director of the Visual Arts Program in 2021. He and his wife, Stephanie, a writer, have two sons and live in New York City.
Big Chief Demond Melancon
About the Artist
Demond Melancon (b. 1978) works solely with a needle and thread to sew glass beads onto canvas. He began this practice in 1992 when he first became part of the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans, a culture whose roots are woven through more than two centuries of history. Big Chief Demond Melancon is well known for creating massive Suits as a Black Masker. His Suits are sculptural forms based on the size of his body which are composed of intricate, hand-sewn beadwork revealing a collective visual narrative. In 2017, Melancon pioneered an emerging contemporary art practice using the same beading techniques he’s been refining over the past 30 years in the Black Masking Culture.
Melancon’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, International African American Museum, African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Haus der Welt der Kulturen (Berlin), London Design Festival, Biennale of Sydney, Art Miami, Arrival Art Fair, and EXPO Chicago. His work is included in the collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, International African American Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, and the LSU Museum of Art. In a span of two years, Demond Melancon was honored with the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2023 and the Gibbes Museum and Society 1858's Prize for Contemporary Southern Art in 2024. In 2026, Big Chief Demond Melancon was announced as one of the 111 artists worldwide invited to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh.
As a self-taught artist, Melancon has been heavily influenced by the teachings of Kerry James Marshall. Often reflecting untold stories from bygone pasts, many of his works honor Black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon while confronting stereotypical representations of Black identity. The potency of Melancon’s work is reinforced by his deep interest in exploring the possibilities of visual storytelling and redefining the traditions of portraiture. Demond Melancon is one of the few artists to pioneer the use of glass beads as an accepted medium in the larger contemporary arts sector. By reconsidering predominant narratives, Melancon deliberately repositions historically overlooked subjects and reimagines institutional portrayal of the Black subject.
Born and Raised in the Lower Ninth Ward
Melancon was born in 1978 and grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He was initially taught by a prolific elder named Big Chief Ferdinand Bigard. Melancon went on to study under Nathanial Williams in connection with a 1993 Louisiana Folklife Apprenticeship Grant. Melancon joined the Seminole Hunters and masked as a Spy Boy for over 15 years under Big Chief Keitoe Jones. In 2012, the elders of the Black Masking community declared that Melancon would then be known as Big Chief Demond Melancon of the Young Seminole Hunters, his very own tribe based in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
He has been part of the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans since 1992 and second-lining since he began to walk. When Demond was 14 years old, he had the opportunity to learn from several influential elder Big Chiefs. They not only taught him how to sew and bead intricate suits, but also about the history and traditions of the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans, which began over 200 years ago. Prior to the Black Masking elders declaring Demond would become the Big Chief of his very own tribe, he had become very well known as being a fierce Spy Boy for the Seminole Hunters, earning the title of “Spy Boy of the Nation.” Big Chief Demond is world renowned for his meticulous hand-sewn beadwork, use of incredibly small seed beads, and attention to details often combining various types of beads (i.e., opaque, transparent, matte, metallic) and a broad spectrum of colors for effect.
Demond Melancon is Big Chief of the Young Seminole Hunters Based in the Lower Ninth Ward
The Big Chief serves as a cultural leader and symbol of strength for his tribe throughout the year, culminating in his role as the spiritual center at the heart of ceremonial battles on Mardi Gras day. The respect a Big Chief earns is grounded in both the beauty and complexity of his suits and his commitment to the traditions of the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans.
Big Chief Demond Melancon’s Suits are technically extraordinary due to two primary factors: the monumental size of his main aprons, worn from the waist to the ankles, and his use of exceptionally small glass seed beads. His fully beaded aprons often exceed 50 inches in width and are constructed using size 11/0 beads, which measure just 2.1 mm, smaller than what is typically used by other Black Maskers in New Orleans. As a result of this combination of scale and precision, Melancon’s Suits require more than 4,000 hours of hand sewing over one million beads to complete.