When I think about Vessna Scheff, I think about the power of presence. Her tall stature and expansive afro may be the first thing you notice about her, but a close second is her authenticity, attentive ear, and mindful way of moving through the world. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone quite so willing to listen as I get to the end of my clumsy sentence. Vessna is an artist living and working in Providence, Rhode Island. As a caretaker for a family member in the area, she lives an intentional life, integrating systems of self care into her routine and finding ways to imbue meaning into her practice. Her main instagram account features her dreamy watercolors and clips of her singing covers and originals, while her second instagram account documents a daily skate diary. Yes, you read that correctly. The artist is sharing video clips of her progress learning to roller skate for an entire year. In this practice, she is finding a daily embodied joy that balances the weight of caregiving. Each post is labeled by which day out of 365 it is. Followers can witness her steady commitment to her own growth and how it results in a therapeutic flow in her day to day. This skate journal is just one example of how Vessna approaches life with an open heart.

As both visual artist and musician, Vessna’s practice and philosophy question how art can exist in various places and function in different ways—from a gallery or a shop, to a t-shirt or an album release. According to Vessna, there seems to be a lot more openness to this cross pollination in the music industry, where musicians often maintain an artistic practice that feeds their music in some way. The visual art world, on the other hand, takes a much more rigid approach. When the artist went through her painting MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), she often had a difficult time getting her painting professors to engage with the music she would pair with her paintings. Despite that fact that she wrote these songs herself, they would often dismiss the audio accompaniment, saying that a musical expression is too easy of way to evoke an emotional response. What then did this professor mean? That because a musical approach is so effective and hard to analytically explain, it can’t possibly be grounded or true? From her many conversations on this topic, Vessna has identified an exclusionary elitism in art institutions that places such an emphasis on the intellectual aspect of the work that an emotional response is often belittled.

In her upcoming album release, “Never Mind The Moon,” Vessna integrates a diversity of approaches. During The Harlem Cultural Festival in the 1969 (also known as The Summer of Soul), an anonymous interviewee was asked what he thought about America’s landing on the moon, and his response was “Never mind the moon, what we need is investment here in Harlem.” In the late 60s, The United States was in the thick of The Cold War, and much of the push for this wildly expensive moon landing was to prove that The United States had more sophisticated technology than The Soviet Union. The United States government spent a total of 28 billion dollars on projects that enabled Apollo—the equivalent of 280 billion dollars today. It’s sad to think how different our country could be today had the funding from the moon landing gone into black communities as a form of reparations. Instead of focusing the immediate and local needs of its citizens, America decided to prove to a far away country that we could land on a distant rock in outer space.

Vessna spoke to the ways in which this statement holds significance today, and how we often pursue lofty goals on a personal level, rather than cultivating the rich relationships right in front of us. This idea reminds me of the experience of talking to someone at a gathering who seems to be constantly scanning the room for someone else to talk to—a better social ladder to climb. How often do we do this in our own lives? Perpetually searching for more prestige, recognition, or accomplishment in such a frenzy that we lose sight of the abundance at our finger tips. Using this quote as the impetus for her songwriting, Vessna has explored themes of human connection at the local level, writing songs that inspire dance and celebration. Having committed to a year of roller skating every day, her beats run parallel to the joy of embodiment and playfulness under a disco ball that operates as a proxy for the moon. In the spirit of The Summer of Soul, Vessna is featuring five musicians (yet to be announced) on her album, and collaborating with her friend and producer, Lee Clarke.

Integrating her fine art explorations into the album release, Vessna has created a sculptural piece to accompany the album. Since the digital age, people have begun to nostalgically engage with retro items such as vinyl records or the polaroid camera. Even while the vinyl record has become outdated, we use it to peer into a different place in time, forcing ourselves to slow down, appreciate the objectivity of this flat cylinder, and allow our bodies to pulse with the cacophony of sounds it holds. Similarly, the polaroid camera has come back into style. The computers in our pockets have the capacity to take countless images, store them in the cloud, and send them to the other side of the world and back in a matter of seconds. The result? Photographs aren’t special anymore. A polaroid helps us to retain the physicality and scarcity of an image—that it can be held in one’s hand and developed before our very eyes.

Vessna has taken this nostalgia for retro objects a step further back in time by exploring expressions of the record and the polaroid with the age old materials of clay and paper. By throwing clay on a wheel, Vessna has replicated the form of a vinyl record, embellishing each ceramic album with glossy patterns of glaze. Additionally, the artist has cut paper to the exact shape and size of a polaroid, and embossed textured compositions into the paper’s recognizable dimensions. Vessna plans to place each ceramic “vinyl record” into paper sleeves with a watercolor exterior and a plush velvet interior. Each album will have an embossed and watercolored paper “polaroid” slipped inside its sleeve. Along with the purchase of her luscious sculpture comes a code to download the album—a playful nod to the unnecessary but highly relevant aspect to the work’s tangibility. Vessna has taken the medium of music which has become less tangible than ever and grounded it in processes that originate from the earth. The sculpture oozes with a reverence for ancient materials and their contrasting textures, speaking to the ways that music and natural materials operate as a historical through-line, connecting us to our ancestors as far back as recorded history allows.

Beyond her album, Vessna has worked in installation, paintings on canvas, watercolor portraits, and collage. Two collages hung on her studio wall, comprised of magazine clippings that form images of black women in contemplative poses. One of the collages has the words “What is equity gonna look like?” We discussed how she enjoys these pieces as a different mode of working that can help her crystallize her thoughts through the appropriation and arrangement of fractured images and words. She pointed to a large framed abstract work on paper leaning on the wall below the collages and explained how it will go to a shop selling handmade items in Brooklyn. Vessna enjoys how her art can exist in a mom and pop shop while also stimulating conversations in a museum exhibition.

Later that night at dinner, Vessna brought up her fantastic collages of black women and explained that she ideally sees those pieces on a t-shirt. Gesturing across the restaurant she hypothesized that seeing those images on a person’s shirt—with the words “what’s equity gonna look like?”—would have the power to stimulate a conversation right here. Empirical data shows that in 2017, 24% of American citizens went into a museum or gallery. That means 76% of the population is not engaging with the lofty critical discourse of the contemporary art world. These collages on t-shirts might serve as contemplative touchstones in the every day that can reach that 76% and potentially be just as culturally formative as the works of art seen in the gallery or museum. By no means is this artist questioning the value of art education or showing at a gallery or museum, rather she is looking to broaden the cultural discourse that these institutions claim to hold dear.

So it’s important to ask, why do we look down on an image as soon as its printed on a t-shirt? Is it possible that the lofty prestigious mindset of this intellectual field has blinded us from the ways we can invest in the people right in front of us? Vessna makes a compelling case that a well crafted ceramic piece sold alongside an album holds just as much intellectual meaning as that of an oil painting at the Museum of Modern Art. Vessna’s interdisciplinary approach invites a conversation right here and now, investing in the people across the restaurant, in the public park, or under the disco ball. By translating grandiose concepts and intangible mediums into ordinary and physical expressions, Vessna Scheff presents ways that we can engage in the present, invest in our communities, and incite a critical discourse for all.

Vessna Scheff: Never Mind the Moon