This exhibition presents a visual conversation between two leading emerging artists that have profoundly influenced one another. Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983, Kha’p’oe Ówîngeh / Santa Clara Pueblo, NM; lives and works in Kha’p’oe Ówîngeh / Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) is a Native artist descended from a long matrilineage of Tewa tribe artists. Her work integrates ancestral Pueblo pottery traditions with metalwork, automotive design, performance, installation, music and creative writing. vanessa german (b.1976, Milwaukee, WI; lives and works in Asheville, NC) is a self-taught citizen and LGBTQIA+ artist and activist, working across sculpture, communal ritual, and immersive installation. Both artists address structural racism, heteropatriarchy, and the persisting reverberations of resource extraction in a post-colonial world. Through the personal perspective of these two individuals from historically marginalized communities, the Museum seeks to enhance public awareness of Indigenous and Black culture, that subsequently may lead to greater empathy and systemic change.

Simpson and german approach the plastic arts with a shared faith in intuition, guiding them through their material engagement and creating artworks centered on the figure. For Simpson, her material connection is primarily through her use of wild New Mexico clay, a physical link to her ancestral land that remains with the work wherever it travels. For german, an instinctual response to found objects leads her process, resulting in the creation of monumental statues she calls Power Figures. The term is a reference to “Nkisi N’kondi”, traditional anthropomorphic sculptures created by the Kongo peoples of Central Africa, from which the artist’s ancestors originated prior to their capturing and enslavement along the borders of Louisiana.

While one artist works through a reduction of raw matter, and the other by accumulating fragments of discarded possessions, the resulting artworks are aligned through their maker’s understanding of material as a representation of the self. While highlighting the distinctions of each artist’s work, the exhibition will reflect their mutual understanding of art as a process through which to reclaim and invent spaces for communicating their personal and ancestral experience. Both artists see their practices as a form of relational aesthetics, rooted in human interaction. The process of art making, even when in private, is a social matter, and the subsequent audience engagement is a way through which to empower viewers to repair the damage wrought by colonial displacement and racial oppression. For these artist-citizens, art is a means of communication that goes beyond language, one that may encourage a more benevolent way of humanity and bond people to their land and one another.