Tag Archives: History

vanessa german quote regarding ET AL … sculpture

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I had the wonderful and unexpected opportunity to chat with vanessa german on the phone yesterday and was able to ask her some questions specifically about the work that we have on view in the museum now. I wasn’t able to record our conversation, but took notes, and was able to jot down some direct quotes.

I asked vanessa about the birds on the heads of the figures and what the symbolism might be and she pointed out that one figure doesn’t have a bird but instead an angel  figure that represents the muse of love – a love that is all encompassing, love that is for the wholeness of your being (your strengths, fears, joys and sorrows) that covers all of the figures.

For the birds, she said that as beings that are part of the natural world they are totally aligned with their insticts and take flight with full sovereignty and as creatures of flight they experience a kind of freedom that others don’t. She said “these are children who made it possible for other children to soar.” 

vg_Craving Light essays

Lastly she noted that birds symbolize liberty, and she quoted abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher “Liberty is the soul’s right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.”

Henry Ward Beecher – Wikipedia

vanessa german sculpture now on view at the Nerman Museum

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We are so excited to now have a work by the amazing artist vanessa german on view in the museum’s second floor galleries. The work, titled ET AL, or The Child Plaintiffs as Power-figures: Courage and Play, Love and Hope, Grace and Compassion, Will and Might, Serenity and Music, Light and Joy, Warrior and Intellect, Creativity and
Vision, is from an exhibition that reflects on the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Topeka court case.

That exhibition, CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love and Reckoning, was commissioned by ArtsConnect and considers the legacies of that 1954 Supreme Court case declaring segregation in schools unconstitutional. Additional selections from this exhibition are on view at the Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University, the
Brown v. Board National Historical Park Site, and the Great Overland Station, all in Topeka, through 2024.

Learn more about vanessa’s work:

For vanessa german, ‘Citizen Artist,’ Creativity Is a Matter of Survival – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

We are still working on getting the label on the wall (the installation was just completed late yesterday!), here is a PDF of that:

vanessa german wall label (PDF)

Happy New Year! More resources for Charlotte Street Fellows exhibition

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Happy New Year! As we begin 2024 there is a lot in transition in the museum’s galleries. Installation work for our two upcoming exhibitions will mean that all of the first-floor galleries will be closed for a few weeks. It may seem a little quiet, but there is a LOT going on behind the scenes.

This is a good time to take a deeper dive into the Charlotte Street Fellows 2023 exhibition, which is open through April 14!

A review of the exhibition here has some additional information that you may find helpful: Review: Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Exhibition – Sixty Inches From Center

Also, we were able to interview Stuart Hinds, Curator of Special Collections and Archives at the University Libraries at UMKC about Ruben Castillo’s research of the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America. A transcript of that conversation is here: Interview with Stuart Hinds UMKC Libraries Special Collections GLAMA (PDF)

And if you would like to know more about Drew Shafer, there is a great article on KCUR about the importance of his activism (and it has more info from Stuart): Meet Drew Shafer, a Kansas City man behind the Midwest’s gay rights movement | KCUR – Kansas City news and NPR

American Infamy – Roger Shimomura

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Roger Shimomura, American Infamy, 2006, Acrylic on canvas panels, 61.62 x 100.5″, Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006.15, Acquired with funds provided by JCCC and Marti and Tony Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer Brothers Foundation

During World War II, the United States government placed into incarceration camps some 110,000 Japanese Americans living along the West Coast. Among them was the Seattle-born Roger Shimomura, whose earliest childhood memories were formed in the Minidoka concentration camp in southern Idaho, where he was sent with his family. Since the late 1970s Shimomura has made hundreds of paintings and prints reflecting on his experience of incarceration, working in a flat, cool style influenced by both American pop art and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. American Infamy, from Shimomura’s Minidoka on My Mind series, presents a wide-angle view of the incarceration camp, spread across four vertical panels like a Japanese folding screen and viewed from a traditional Japanese bird’s-eye perspective, as if to emphasize the government’s conception of the incarcerees as essentially Japanese despite their American ways and citizenship. The composition offers numerous colorful glimpses of daily life in the camp, including women doing laundry, a girl jumping rope and people lined up outside the bathroom. These are overshadowed, however, by the ominous black silhouette of an armed guard wielding binoculars at the left, and by the dark clouds that obscure the composition’s base and several parts of the scene above, clearly signaling Shimomura’s critical view of this unjust incarceration.

Roger Shimomura earned his BA from the University of Washington in 1961 and his MFA from Syracuse University in 1969. Shimomura is also a respected printmaker, and JCCC owns several of his prints which are on view in the Carlsen Center’s Works on Paper focus area.

— David Cateforis, 2012