Lum Art Prize Winner • Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales
We are honored to present our first Lum Art Prize Winner, Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales. The depth of Wallace-Gonzales’ work captured our attention in 2019 at her solo exhibition, The Individuation, at The Basic Premise, Ojai, and more recently, in the 2021 show Planet Earth at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College. When we visited her studio at Bell Arts Factory in Ventura, it was clear that Wallace-Gonzales was an artist of today: intelligent and brave, putting herself and her practice at the threshold of authenticity and poetry.
In the following conversation with Wallace-Gonzales, the artist’s roots in Black culture and coastal California’s ecology come into focus, as she describes growing up in Santa Barbara’s historic Black neighborhood and the North Ventura Avenue community along the river that connects Ojai to the ocean.
Her cultural and environmental background has been further shaped by her academic formation at the Maryland Institute College of Art. All this to say that while Wallace-Gonzales is in the early years of her career, she is anything but an accidental artist; she brings years of cultural examination, research and skill to her work, presenting a pleating vision of the self that is fresh and intriguing.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, Lovers’ Shadow, cyanotype on cotton fabric
Debra Herrick: Much of your work is based in self-portraiture – life-sized silhouettes, cyanotypes of the body, masks and other mold casts of your body. Tell me about who you are and why you were drawn to art and particularly, the self-portrait.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales: I’m very interested in the human body and how your body plays a key part in how the world interacts with you and how you interact with the world. I think when people see bodies in art it is natural to quickly make the connection to ourselves. I want my audience to see my work and bring their own interpretations, their own stories to the works. I think including bodies or images of bodies makes it easier for my art to serve as a conduit that other humans (the audience) can use. I also think of the bodies in my work as avatars for myself and I’m constantly trying to reimagine this world and these beings in it. By doing this, it’s my way of honoring the fluidity and my disinterest in being defined by the outside world.
I see myself as an ever-changing being with nuances and many elements of my identity, but I often feel that in this very binary society we exist in, there is a push to put yourself in a box. I’m not really interested in that and so I’ve been building this world in my art, reimagining it over and over again but still building upon what was there before. I think as long as I am making work, I will always use the body and especially my body because I too am evolving with the work.
And who I am is a difficult question to answer, but I guess if I had to introduce myself I would say I am Vanessa Lynette Wallace-Gonzales. I am the child of a Black and Indigenous woman, my father is a Mexican man. I would say that I am a queer Black Latinx femme artist, who was raised by a single mother with the help a of a village, meaning my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and aunty. I am the result of my elders’ passion and love.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, Skin You Can’t Hide Your Eyes, paper, pigment, acrylic medium, abolne, gold leaf, photo by Brian Paumier
Your grandmother moved to Santa Barbara in the 1970s and was a part of a strong Black community on the Eastside. In a recent conversation we had, you called it “a mecca for a lot of Black people.” You also grew up in Santa Barbara before moving to Ventura as an adolescent. Tell us about that community, your grandmother’s experience and your own.
The community we had in Santa Barbara was like one huge family, at least from what I can remember, maybe part of that was due to being young. I remember having a lot of different friends from many different backgrounds and ethnicities. I lived in an apartment complex off of Milpas. It was full of working-class families. The adults took care of everyone’s kids, not just their own, so if my mom was working that day, I would hang out with a neighbor and my friends in their apartment until my mother came home. It truly felt like one large family.
I think for my grandmother she found a community of Black people who were coming from the South in search of something new and something beautiful. I think they found that in Santa Barbara.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, Skin: We Will Protect You, paper, pigment, acrylic medium, abalone, gold leaf, and magazine images, photo by Brian Paumier
You’ve mentioned to me that after moving to Ventura, where you lived in the North Ventura Avenue neighborhood, art became more important to you. You talked about isolating yourself because of acts of racism, and seeking out methods to understand your identity through art. I’m hoping you feel open to talking about that here. What happened and what impact do you think that time had on you as an artist?
We moved to Ventura because Santa Barbara was becoming too difficult to afford. Moving to Ventura was a culture shock for sure. For the first time, I didn’t really feel safe in my neighborhood because my family experienced a lot of racism. Some of our neighbors let it be known that we were not welcome by doing things like painting swastikas on our fence and leaving dead snakes on our front door. This led to us spending more time inside.
Art became my sanctuary, and I was able to create my safe space in my art. In the real world, I was very limited, but my art had no rules and that is what I love about it. Art became a way to express myself in a safe way. I also came to realize that art was a way to share my feelings but also to get others to feel those feelings. At some point, I realized how powerful that was and that is what pushed me to study art.
Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, Skin: Spirit Dancing, paper, pigment, acrylic medium, abalone and gold leaf, photo by Brian Paumier
A lot of the materials you use come directly from nature, such as shells and insects you collect. You also incorporated living creatures in your 2018 solo show at The Basic Premise. Tell me about your relationship with nature and why it holds a strong place in your art and practice.
Nature is an important element in my work because it’s an important element in my life. My work really reflects my personality, interests and loves. I think of myself as a being of nature and so I use it in my work because I see the connections between humans and nature as inseparable.
Nature has also become a way for me to channel my ancestors. My grandmother and great-grandmother both had green thumbs and every time I spend time watering my plants or going on hikes, I think about them and imagine what they would say. I imagine them telling me about the lessons I can learn from nature and so I use nature in my work in the same way. The natural elements are symbolic for lessons we can learn about ourselves.
Self-study and self-discovery are important to your practice. You’ve also told me that you see your work less in terms of where it fits in the art canon and more in terms of mental health and community. Can you expand on this concept/objective?
When I think about it again, I do think there is a place for my work and what I am interested in. Thinking about it further, many of the artists I follow have found a way to merge the two outside of the traditional canon and I believe that’s what I’m interested in. Artists like Guadalupe Maraville and Theaster Gates create spaces for community and healing while sharing their work.
I love making art, but I also think I need to make art and I think that art has played a huge part in my mental health and healing. When I was young, I didn’t know of many artists that looked like me or had similar backgrounds, so the idea of being an artist didn’t feel accessible and the art world felt very distant. As I got older, I started to meet more artists I could relate to, I found a community and I started believing that art was for me too. Now I’m interested in showing others that art is for you. So when I have had the opportunity for solo shows, I had these thoughts in mind. I tried to curate spaces that felt healing, safe and inviting for everyone, not just the usual gallery goers. I think for me sometimes going into an all-white gallery space can feel intimidating and foreign, very separate from our own realities and I do believe there is a place for that.
But in my work, I’m interested in reclaiming these spaces and making these spaces that can feel strange, familiar. I do this by considering all of the senses, designing food for taste, scenting the rooms for smell, working with musicians to create music for sound and offering tokens like crayons molded from my fingers for touch. I try to invoke all of these senses, because I want the audience to really feel like they are in this world I created and in the hopes that even if you’re someone who considers yourself “not really into art” you still may find the scent of the room reminds you of a memory and then you start looking at the work differently, maybe it becomes more familiar and maybe you’re able to see your own story in this world I’ve created.
Above & Cover: Lum Art Prize Winner, Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, photographed by Brian Paumier. Headpiece: Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, Pieces of Me, wax, pigment & dried flowers
*The Lum Art Prize feature is sponsored by the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation. Lum’s biannual art prize is awarded to regional artists from BIPOC communities or other historically underrepresented groups, including people with disabilities.
This article was originally published in print in Lum Art Magazine 05.
An Artist Talk with Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales will be held at Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Ojai, on April 30 at 5:30pm. Free and open to the public.
A Chef’s Table for the Arts honoring Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales and featuring art-inspired dishes by Executive Chef Nirasha Rodriguez will be held at The Food Liaison, Carpinteria, on June 10. For tickets, visit lumartzine.com/chefstable or contact editor@lumartzine.com.
