White Plains has long been home to a substantial Black community: According to the latest U.S. Census, 13.3% of the city’s residents identify as Black or African American. Over the years, however, development projects have led to the displacement of many longtime residents from the city’s central, historically rooted neighborhoods.
Photographer Chioma “ChiChi” Nwana has been documenting how Black White Plains locations are surviving the changes around them. Her latest show, “Forever, Amen,” on view at ArtsWestchester’s Shenkman Gallery (31 Mamaroneck Ave. in White Plains) through August. 2, makes note of some of the city’s oldest Black churches and looks at the people who still come together to gather inside them. Black churches in White Plains have served as spiritual homes for generations of residents, and ArtsWestchester describes “Forever, Amen” as an ongoing study of the city’s oldest Black congregations.
“The project was to … explore what the inside of these churches looks like and what it means to be Black and to be in these spaces and to be a member of a church, be a member of a community in a way that we don’t necessarily get to do as much these days, as so much is changing,” said Nwana, who was born and raised in White Plains.
Nwana said “Forever, Amen” is related to her earlier work, “You’re From Where I’m From,” which looked at the city’s historically Black neighborhoods –– sites like Battle Avenue, Dekalb, Ferris Avenue, Fisher Avenue, the Valley, and Winbrook –– as they were being redeveloped.
Black neighborhoods in White Plains were established through migration, church foundings, and community organizing, but in the mid-20th century, urban renewal uprooted most Black renters, small businesses, and institutions from neighborhoods like Winbrook, a historically Black area whose name combined those of Winchester and Brookfield Streets. Renewal efforts ravaged the neighborhood, and the area is now more racially diverse, but Winbrook’s essence remains central to Black White Plains, Nwana insisted, in the Black churches in and around the area.
More recently, luxury apartment construction and redevelopment have continued to tear apart the city’s historically Black neighborhoods. Rising rents and housing costs have forced so many residents to move that most church members today commute back to the area for Sunday service or to take part in family days and reunions.
Nwana photographed five churches for the “Forever, Amen” exhibition. She said her focus is not only on photographing the architecture of the historic churches that remain, but also on capturing intimate displays of belonging. “I was looking for things that were quintessentially a church experience,” she told the AmNews while describing a photograph in the exhibition of two older women helping two young girls prepare for baptism by placing shower caps over their hair: “This moment … there’s already the intergenerational interaction happening … these two older women are putting shower caps on these two Black girls, and that to me feels so specifically Black.”
Nwana said her next major project, supported by a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, focuses on Nigerian Igbo music artists and asks how ideas of success have changed across generations. That new work again reflects on Nwana’s main concern in “Forever, Amen” and other exhibits where she tries to pinpoint the moments that strengthen people, keeps them together, and keeps them returning to what remains of a transformed community — a community that still makes them feel comfortable.
