Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program: vanessa german and Eric N. Mack

The Speed Art Museum is pleased to announce the inaugural presentations of the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program (SGVAP), an initiative supported by the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Created in honor of Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), the Mississippi-born artist who grew up in Louisville and studied at the University of Louisville, where he first developed the scaffolding for his painting practice and existed in a vibrant community of Black artists.

Conceived as both a visiting artist program and experimental incubator for new modes of pedagogical thought, the SGVAP brings two contemporary artists to Kentucky each year to broaden the social landscape of their work through research, fellowship, public dialogue, and exchange with regional artists, ideas, and community members. The initiative is grounded in Gilliam’s lifelong connection to the city and in the Speed’s commitment to contemporary art as a space of material invention, historical inquiry, and civic exchange.

To conclude its first year, the SGVAP presents two exhibitions: vanessa german: …do you remember when you were the sky?, on view April 10 through June 28, 2026, and Eric N. Mack: RARE ESSENCE, on view May 27 through November 29, 2026. Organized by Assistant Curator Diallo Simon-Ponte, these projects explore two disparate models of practice: german’s work with performance, assemblage, and collective imagination; and Mack’s site-responsive investigation of painting, textile, architecture, and public space.

For the SGVAP, german developed a social-and-community-based project in Louisville over several months of research and public dialogue. Her process included Future Histories of Emancipation, a three-day participatory performance series presented in October 2025 at the University of Louisville’s Gottschalk Hall, the former site of the Colored Girls Dormitory of the Louisville Industrial School of Reform, as well as the Belknap Playhouse Theater and the Speed. Drawing from research by Dr. Felicia Jamison and Saidiya Hartman, the series considered histories of Black girlhood, institutional confinement, experiments in freedom, and collective memory. Joining the performance ensemble were local dancers and Grammy-nominated violinist V.C.R.

This ritual-based research process culminated in …do you remember when you were the sky?, an exhibition of german’s assemblage sculptures. The presentation includes new work made from materials such as mineral crystals, teacups, quilts, doll parts, and cowrie shells. Multiple sculptures incorporate objects and ideas contributed by Louisville residents during german’s performances. Rather than presenting community as a subject represented from a distance, german’s project invites community as a material and social force within the work itself. Between the performance series and the exhibition, two workshops were presented by Assistant Curator Sirene Martin, titled "Critical Thinking Through Object Making: A Memory Jug Workshop," to offer moments of embodied knowledge to the public.

Eric N. Mack: RARE ESSENCE explores contemporary ideas of material experimentation and the social life of museum spaces. Presented in the Museum’s Gheens Court, Mack’s site-responsive installation consists of suspended textile paintings that alter one of the Speed’s most active areas of circulation. Made from fabrics that are sheer, painted, patterned, stained, worn, and recombined, the works invite shifting relationships among color, light, architecture, and visitor movement.

Mack’s installation occupies a threshold within the Speed for the first time in its history, where the museum’s 1927 building meets the 2016 expansion designed by Kulapat Yantrasast. In this setting, RARE ESSENCE considers painting as an environmental and social form rather than a fixed object. Mack’s engagement with textiles, suspension, and spatial movement creates a dialogue with Gilliam’s rethinking of canvas while extending that legacy through fashion, found material, bodily movement, and architectural encounter.

The SGVAP is led by Diallo Simon-Ponte, the Sam Gilliam Assistant Curator of Artist Programs, and co-founded and supervised by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum. Support for SGVAP is provided by the Sam Gilliam Foundation.

Earlier this spring, the Speed announced its Year Two SGVAP artists: Deana Lawson and Brandon Ndife.