THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN PAUSED AND IS NO LONGER HAPPENING DURING TBA:21.
Artist Conversation: vanessa german and Mia Imani with Elisheba Johnson (Wa Na Wari)
DESCRIPTION
In this featured panel conversation, Elisheba Johnson (curator, Wa Na Wari, Seattle) facilitates a conversation with vanessa german (Pittsburgh) and Mia Imani (Berlin) about their individual TBA performances (THE BLUE WALK and Mourning Rituals, respectively) and their broader artistic practices. While highly distinct, both german and Imani engage—through iterative processes, movement rituals, place-based research, and public participation—the specificities of space and site, erasure of histories and narratives, and possibilities for gathering and healing in the context of Portland’s Black communities and spatial geographies.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
vanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. 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.
A visual storyteller, german utilizes assemblage and mixed media, combining locally found objects to build protective ritualistic structures known as her power figures or tar babies. Modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and drawing on folk art practices, they are embellished with materials including beading, glass, fabric, and sculpted wood, and come into existence at the axis on which Black power, spirituality, mysticism and feminism converge.
Based in Homewood, Pittsburgh, german’s artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the local neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german opened the ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency.
Upholding artmaking as an act of restorative justice, german confronts and begins to dismantle the emotional and spiritual weight imposed by the multi-generational oppression of African American communities. As a queer Black woman living in the United States, german has described this as a deeply necessary process of adventuring into the wild freedom that the inhabitation of such identities demands. This activist instinct emerges in german’s work to postulate powerful narratives of freedom and love.
german has been awarded the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the 2017 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 United States Artist Grant and, most recently, the 2018 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the West Virginia University Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, David C. Driskell Center, Snite Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. german’s fine art work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Figge Art Museum, The Union for Contemporary Art, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Flint Institute of Arts, Mattress Factory, Everson Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Studio Museum, Ringling Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
---
Mia Imani is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer based in Berlin, Germany. She creates and curates liminal spaces that invite Black and Brown communities to heal individual and communal trauma through conscious (daydreaming, visualization) and subconscious (lucid, REM sleep) dreaming. These works aim to center the agency of marginalized communities and use dreams as a portal to manifest alternative past(s), present(s), and future(s). She received her BA in media communications studies from the University of Washington and is completing her master’s degree in North American Culture and Literature studies at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
---
Elisheba Johnson is a curator, public artist, and administrator. Johnson, who has a BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, was the owner of Faire Gallery Café, a multi-use art space that held art exhibitions, music shows, poetry readings, and creative gatherings. For six years, Johnson worked at the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture on capacity-building initiatives and racial equity in public art. Johnson is currently a member of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network advisory council and has won four Americans for the Arts Public Art Year in Review Awards for her work. She currently co-manages Wa Na Wari, a Black art center in Seattle’s Central District that uses the arts to build community and resist displacement.
---
Wa Na Wari is committed to the ideas of Black artists from all over the diaspora and partnering with TBA in 2021 offers us the opportunity to work even more closely with Black femme artists who are lifting up Black joy, Black resistance, and Black power.
TBA has long been the reason Seattlietes have traveled down the I-5 corridor to experience performance art from all over the world. This year is no different. Our work together will be to hold space for intense conversations about Black land and autonomy, Black bodies and historical erasure, all while combating the physiological and psychological effects of gentrification on Black people all over the Northwest.
ABOUT TBA:21 INSTITUTE
TBA Institute is a series of free, public programs that connect artists and audiences through deep discussion and critical conversation and serve to illuminate the ideas and inquiries behind festival artists' projects. Through the Institute, artists share their processes of creating and collaborating; their forms of engagement with communities and publics; and the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts and concerns surrounding their work. Through guest artist lectures, panels and dialogues with invited moderators, and interactive workshops, the TBA Institute offers a range of ways to engage more deeply with the festival and with each other.
Please note that some TBA Institute events will be virtual (streamed online), while others will be held in-person for a limited-capacity, masked audience/participant group in the PICA Pavilion (back lot of PICA). We know that not everyone is able to gather in place right now. As such, most in-person events will be recorded and made available and accessible online shortly thereafter. Some of these recorded videos will be captioned.
Please refer to the TBA Festival website for a full Institute schedule, specific information about each event, accessibility, and other details.
Please note that a few events will require pre-registration, with instructions provided on the event webpage.
All virtual events (streamed online) will be captioned via auto- or CART captioning.
Some virtual events and some live, in-person events will be ASL-interpreted. These will be noted on each event listing on the TBA website.
All of the above information regarding access will be updated as confirmed.