THE RAREST BLACK WOMAN ON PLANET EARTH is on view at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum through May 28, 2023. No one story, element, or gift is valued above another.
This evokes the physicality of our surroundings (a path, movement, stone) and the emotionality of what such concepts represent in our everyday lives (the journey, the heart). Similarly, “WALK IN BEAUTY” is a sculptural rendition of knee-high boots made of rose quartz.
In the pair, there is “one for leaving and one for coming back,” the artist says. In “THE FATHER SHOES,” one shoe has nails that evoke the feeling of digging into the earth, while the other sole features shimmery thread. There is also a sense of freedom and groundedness across the show. The installation, “MUSEUM OF EMANCIPATORY OBJECTS,” is made up of artifacts and words collected from the Mount Holyoke community related to questions of emancipation. German translates that revelation into a mixed-media installation and healing site so deeply rooted in place that it captures the concurrence of time. “WALK IN BEAUTY” (2022), mixed-media assemblage, 18.75 x 6 x 11 inches each While reaching for objects society deems valuable and in a reality where fat, Black, queer women are not, she was not granted value but instead recognized it already within herself.
She found that she was not only grasping for something but that she was moved and found connection through the tactile interactions. German’s solo exhibition, THE RAREST BLACK WOMAN ON PLANET EARTH, began as a quest to own the story of the Skinner Museum by doing what no one else on Earth can do to these precious items: touch them.
Abstract shape collage skin#
Think of our own porosity…Our skin is just a membrane…it keeps us bound together enough so we can think of ourselves as individuals, but it’s also a constant exchange of information between ourselves and the world around us,” Van Horn says. “That involves us not just venturing out into the world in a way that we are just grasping what we need but being open. On an episode of The Green Dreamer, Gavin Van Horn from the Center for Humans and Nature talks about flipping our perspective from being head over heels to heels over head, instead privileging touch. german finds past, present, and future in everything from Native American baskets to Samurai swords to pieces of the Great Pyramid of Giza.īy touching these great American valuables, the artist explores ideas of rarity and protection amongst the context of this country’s sordid history with distorting people, objects, and the inherent value of every living thing. In her latest project with the Skinner Museum-Mount Holyoke’s early 20th-century cabinet of curiosities-she explores what decolonization means by interacting with the institution’s 7,000 precious historical objects.
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Vanessa german knows how to translate experiences.
All images by Laura Shea, courtesy of Kasmin, New York, shared with permission “THE FATHER SHOES” (2022), mixed-media assemblage, 25 x 22 x 13.25 inches. The bright red fiery orbs apparent from this view are new stars, which are formed “when knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust… begin to collapse under their own gravity (and) slowly heat up.” When cropped, the new image shows the Eagle Nebula, located 6,500 light-years away. This new 122-megapixel photo features a deep-blue expanse studded with light, and the pillars themselves appear less opaque than in the earlier shot. That initial image offered an illuminating glimpse of the interstellar stone-like columns made of gas and dust, although a composite recently released from the James Webb Space Telescope uses near-infrared light to highlight the region in even more detail. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI), shared with permissionīack in 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope documented the now iconic Pillars of Creation, a photo of a celestial area known for its staggering number of star formations. All images courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M.
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