Vanessa Meshack is an interdisciplinary artist from Dallas, Texas.

My practice engages fibers, printmaking, and ceramics to explore themes of self-actualization and Black existentialism through a womanist’s perspective. I create textile art that echoes my ancestor’s ability to conjure warmth out of scraps of fabric. I sculpt clay gourd-shaped vessels to resemble the calabash and embed metal in them to acknowledge the duality of intergenerational trauma and resilience of Black women. I create works on paper that act as a reflective documentation that centers my lived experiences during challenging times of deliberate cultural erasure. Finding peace in Black existentialism means cultivating a sense of inner freedom, authenticity, and meaning by acknowledging the realities of racialized suffering and anti-Blackness.  The process of creating is, for me, and act of reclaiming my humanity and agency in a world that often seeks to negate it, moving from a state of being “acted upon” by oppression to actively defining myself.   

The guiding principles in my work are rooted in the writer and activist, Alice Walker’s concept of womanism, and the spiritual activism and hoodoo practices of my ancestral legacy.  I am interested in how historically enslaved women, and marginalized women of color in the present have engaged in forms of conjure that are embedded in daily domestic and creative tasks for subversion and protection from systemic oppression.  

My body of work is an effort to reveal my community’s ongoing pursuit of freedom, liberation, and what it means to simply exist in a racist and oppressive society. My choice of materials is not merely a medium to express these ideas; the materials invite contemplation on the conditions of my existence as an African American, provide a space to preserve history, and function as vessels for my own grief.