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We are thrilled to announce the confirmation of Vanessa German as our Keynote Speaker at the 2024 MSA Conference in Birmingham, AL! 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. Her 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. Vanessa will share insights into mixed-media sculpture and contemporary African-American art, offering a unique lens often marginalized in broader discussions. |
GUEST SPEAKERS
| Guest speaker, George Ferrandi, is an American artist whose performance, installation and participatory projects address issues of vulnerability, impermanence, fallibility and spectacle, often through experimental approaches to narrative. Employing a unique humor and deep sense of humanity, her work ranges in form and scale from simple gestures–like resting her head on the shoulder of a stranger on the subway, to giant spectacles–like parading with hundreds of people through the streets of South Philly. It’s often a collaborative experiment in story-telling, with participants becoming performers in the narrative or even creating it. |
Guest speaker, Jiha Moon, is from Daegu, South Korea, and currently lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Moon's gestural paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from a wide range of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone. Moon's work has been acquired by museums around the country including The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Renwick Gallery, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim award and Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painter and Sculptor’s award, and her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most Everyone’s Mad Here,” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, has toured more than 15 museums around the country. Moon is an Assistant Professor in the Art department at Florida State University. |
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More information on programming is coming soon! |