sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies

September 14 – November 30, 2019

For the 2019 Wanda D. Ewing Commission, the Pittsburgh-based artist Vanessa German presented sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies., a multimedia installation addressing violence against people of color, particularly members of the LGBTQ+ community. As the artist writes, “To say that sometimes we cannot be with our bodies is deep acknowledgment of an ongoing reckoning between past, present, future & striations of the political, cultural & spiritual impact of systemic racism & its attendant brutalities on the physical & spiritual bodies of Black, Brown & Native peoples on this land.”

The timing of this exhibition was fortuitous, coinciding with Omaha’s 100-year commemoration of the Will Brown lynching and the 50-year commemoration of Vivian Strong’s murder, and the 50th anniversary year of the Stonewall uprising, a turning point in the modern fight for LGBTQ+ liberation. As Omaha reckons with its history of race relations and the nation grapples with rising hate crimes and human rights abuses, sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. honored lives lost and served as “a space of deep grieving . . . in a world that sometimes doesn’t give space for grief,” says German. The exhibition also served to remind us of the transformative power of art and love.

This installation was originally commissioned in 2017 by the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.