Craving Light: The Museum of Love & Reckoning
Works by citizen artist vanessa german
About this project
Internationally renowned citizen artist vanessa german worked in residence in Topeka alongside members of the community over the course of a year to create a touring museum of multimedia sculptures and a spoken word operetta that will be presented to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board case decision. The touring installation, titled CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love & Reckoning premiered at the Mulvane Art Museum on May 16th, 2024.
At workshops, site visits, and interviews, Topekans made art and shared their stories with german. She used these materials to create a new body of work that spans media from sculpture to collage to video. The installation embodies stories from the lives of the Brown v. Board plaintiffs and others who were affected by its outcome. CRAVING LIGHT offers an opportunity for each of us to reckon with the past, transform our hearts, and work toward a better future.
Below are the photos taken during the opening night of the CRAVING LIGHT exhibition. With nearly 250 people in attendance, this exquisite exhibition opened to the public. This body of work is unlike anything that has ever been shown in Topeka - and to have these works of art reflect a deeply personal history that is centered in this community is something that we should not take lightly or for granted. It is our hope that all Topekans will have a chance to see these works on display at the Blitt Gallery through mid-July with the exhibition continuing to the Great Overland Station where it will be on view through the end of the year.
About vanessa german
vanessa german is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. Establishing her own self-taught approach and distinctive artistic language, german’s influential practice employs mineral crystals, beads, glass, found objects, and other sourced material to create expressive figurative sculptures that resound through the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her unique sculptural vocabulary transmits healing energy, affirming the power of love as an infinite human technology.
german’s sculptures are as much defined by their tangible elements as their transcendental properties, a combination which the artist describes as the ingredients of her work. Since the early 2010s, she has assembled ritualistic structures known as power figures using glass, beads, gemstones, nails, wood, and other objects. Whether mineral crystals originating in the earth millennia ago, or cobalt blue bottles resembling those used in bottle tree traditions for generations, every object chosen by german channels frequencies that span its entire existence. Channeling precolonial and African diasporic traditions, her figures allude to the Kongo nkisi nkondi, each charged by the protective and restorative spirits that complement their physical materials. Guided by her own creativity, imagination and curiosity, german follows her intuition about the capacity for objects to tell stories, creating sculptures that resonate deeply with those who encounter them.
Download The Craving Light Program and Guide
THE WAY OF LIGHT:
A Spoken Word Operetta
About this project
“THE WAY OF LIGHT” is a spoken word operetta performed in Topeka on May 24, 2024, by a mass intergenerational, multiracial community choir. The operetta was professionally recorded, licensed, and one of the movements of the operetta will be visioned and filmed as a music/new media video and submitted for Grammy consideration in the Spoken Word category.
There is a simple bigness to bringing this work forward in the form of an intergenerational community choir performing a spoken word operetta - combined with CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love & Reckonining, these works delve fearlessly through the doorway of Brown v Board and into dimensions of human citizenship that are the truest heart of the phrase, “American Spirit.”
We are the living commemoration. We offer this commemoration as a creative expression of King’s BELOVED COMMUNITY. We Listen. We Create. This is mending as transformation, commemoration as realization, community as love.
Download The Way Of Light Program
“The way of light requires shadow. There is no illumination without its opposite. In this way, we are divine.”
vanessa german
Additional Information
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ArtsConnect is excited to formally announce the premiere events related to new works by internationally renowned citizen artist vanessa german, who has been working in residence in Topeka over the course of the past year. The body of work she created alongside members of the community includes a touring museum of multimedia sculptures and a spoken word operetta that will be performed by a combined community choir with vanessa german and other special guests. Both are being presented to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board case decision.
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Visit Topeka Inc. (VTI) and ArtsConnect are proud to announce that ArtsConnect has been selected as a recipient of an “Our Town” grant by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The funding will support a new multidisciplinary, community-based artwork series by award-winning, world-renowned artist vanessa german and will coincide with the 70th anniversary commemoration of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (BVB) case that outlawed segregation in the country’s public schools. The new NEA-backed project will be part of “Civil Rights Summer” in Topeka, a collection of special projects and activities planned for summer of 2024.
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In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board case decision, internationally renowned artist vanessa german will co-write the operetta with Topeka poet August Mendoza and recording artist Angel Haze.
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vanessa german (b. 1976, USA) is a multidisciplinary citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir. Her work is held in private and public collections internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Wichita Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Click here to visit the website of the Kasmin Gallery, where you’ll find more information about vanessa’s work as a citizen artist. You can also find her on Instagram @vanessalgerman.
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ArtsConnect recently released the Topeka Arts & Culture Master Plan. Many of the plan’s recommendations call for us to move our community forward by telling our stories using art as a way to understand our past and build our collective future. The ‘history book’ version of Brown v. Board is what most people know, but there are people in this community whose stories have not been told. We must continue the work already being done to bring these stories to the surface.
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With the help of Group Creative Services (GCS), a Des Moines-based consulting firm, we sought proposals for this project publicly as well as through direct outreach to artists at the local, regional & national levels. We received more than 50 responses to the RFQ from artists all over the nation.
The selection committee, comprised of more than a dozen Topekans, helped select three artists who were invited to present full proposals. These proposals were reviewed and scored by the selection committee as well as members of the ArtsConnect board, community art leaders and many other members of the community.
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VANESSA GERMAN ON RECKONING
“I am thinking about this work and the entire process of the work of commemorating Brown as a reckoning - as a living reckoning. A reckoning requires us to take a count; to go back into the archives, to look at the transcripts, to look at what exists and to look for what is missing.
“This reckoning is creative; this reckoning is generative. This reckoning is an act of making. It's not just a conversation, because it will continue to go on and become a part of how we increase our capacity to hold complexity; the capacity to hold tenderness, and ultimately develop the capacity to hold both tenderness and complexity at the same time.”
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Residents of Topeka and beyond are invited to share stories, connections, creativity and vision through a nearly 10 month long series of creative actions that will include storytelling and writing workshops, making workshops and a performance opportunity.
If you want to have your name added to the list for receiving information, please send an email to Sarah by clicking here. Thank you in advance for your interest in the project.
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YES. Over the next 10 months, vanessa will be working with ArtsConnect to identify artists of all ages and abilities who will be able to participate in fabrication, performance, writing, and more. Currently, we are seeking two individuals who are high school-age to assist with writing - you can click here to get more information.