Everything that can happen in a day often does

When the streets start to hum in the morning

Car engines rattle newborns awake

A crowd crosses, each set of shoes clacking in their own symphony

When panels of panes

Reveal a gridlocked interior landscape

And movement like a moment,

Slow like a golden hue drips in reverse back to blue

When sunset is a shuttered dawn

And a surface is anything but

When rain falls from a swollen sky

Forming a puddle, a pool,

A portal to another place

When a faded lipstick kiss stains a martini glass rim

While birds are cooing and queueing, catching fireflies

And bicycles churn around corners,

While somewhere on the 3rd floor of a pre-war apartment

Fruit rots in a bowl,

A cell phone rings until reaching a full voicemail box

A belly gurgles with evening hunger

While a relic of religion crumbles

Into the space between us

And money changes hands

Ice melts

Salt compliments pepper

A mother whispers

While the leaf of a potted plant unfurls

Bugs kiss in the grass

An opportunity slips away

Two people argue over dinner, then hug and make up

But still sleep on different sides of the bed

A light flickers on and off,

In the distance, the life size shadow of a body appears

Look now, before it’s gone

Everything that can happen in a day often does

And does again and again and again

Vanessa Kowalski is a Polish-American independent curator, writer, editor and artist. She also works as an advisor and consultant for artists, collectors, and institutions, such as the Percent for Art Program. She holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and an MA in Curating, Mediating, and Managing Art from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. After co-founding an alternative gallery space in Los Angeles, she has gone on to curate numerous exhibitions and series of public programming both locally and internationally. She is a co-founder and editor of we need to talk, a publication launched in Helsinki which looked at the art of the interview. Her artworks and writing have been featured in books and publications such as Clog x Artificial Intelligence, Take Shape Mag, Precog Mag, Speed of Resin, Spectra Poets, NO NIIN Magazine and more. Her MA dissertation, 'On Curating, Online: Buying Time in the Middle of Nowhere,' explored ideas of exhibiting artworks in the digital realm and the need for expanded practices of care in the curatorial field at large through a feminist framework. Her work primarily focuses on elevating historically marginalised voices, namely that of women artists, and the importance of rewriting the canon to better reflect the spectrum of art making and practice at large.

She served as the Program Director of the NARS Foundation, an International Artist Residency Program dedicated to supporting emerging and mid-career artists located in Sunset Park from 2018-2020, managed Magenta Plains, and worked as a Studio Director for Geoffrey Biddle Studio. She currently lives in California, where she is the Studio Director for ceramicist and lighting designer John Wigmore.

vanessa@vanessakowalski.com

recently:

Spectra Poets
Percent for Art - Panelist
Friends and Family - Magenta Plains
Helsinki Biennial - Niskanen Salo
Reading Room - dispersed holdings
UnFair Amsterdam with Hugo Rocci
In Conversation with Carlos Franco @ ISCP
Collaboration with Kirill Zakomoldin - Precog Magazine
Lishui Photography Festival - Lishui, China
the grass is always #00ff00 - NARS Foundation
Speed of Resin - dispersed holdings - Book Launch - NYABF
Behind the Seen - NARS Foundation
Now is Always Someone Else - Levan Mindiashvili - NARS Foundation

Upcoming:

No Niin Magazine
Hot Pink Mag
Somewhere between totally healed and dying - Well, well, well, New York

education:

M.A. Curating, Mediating & Managing Art
Aalto — Helsinki, Finland
2016 - 2018

B.F.A. Photography
School of Visual Arts — New York City
2009 - 2013

B.F.A. Photography Exchange
Ar.Co - Lisbon, Portugal
2012

download c.v.