The Speed Art Museum’s Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program to Present Performances Based on the History of Gottschalk Hall with Artist vanessa german
October 16, 2025
This article originally appeared here on Speed Art Museum's website.
Performance Information
Future Histories of Emancipation | A three-day performance
The Louisville Industrial School of Reform was founded in 1854 to serve troubled juveniles and set them on the path to becoming good citizens. In 1896, they opened “The Colored Girls Dormitory,” housing its first students, with fifteen Black girls occupying the building. Little to no documentation exists on the period of the dormitory excluding a report in the Courier Journal of eleven girls devising a plan to free themselves from the institution. On July 19th, 1913, six of the girls escaped by tying bedsheets together, forming a rope. They scaled down the side of the building and fled into the night.
“Future Histories of Emancipation,” a three-day participatory performance series by artist vanessa german, will take place at the University of Louisville’s Gottschalk Hall (formerly the Colored Girls Dormitory), the Belknap Playhouse Theater, and the Speed Art Museum. Taking cues from the compiled research of UofL Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities Felicia Jamison and scholar Saidiya Hartman’s novel “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” each performance will hold the Colored Girls Dormitory as a historical point of departure to explore the radical experiment of imagining what freedom looks like on the other side of capture. Across each day, we will traverse a funeral for freedom, an art studio at the edge of civilization, and interactive imagination rituals.
Joining vanessa for the performances will be 3-time Grammy-nominated violinist, VCR, and local Louisville dancers, Michaiah Peebles and Brittany Renee. In holding performance as a collaborative ritual, the audience will be asked to contribute poems, live testimony, and mark-making with provided materials as a way to communally pursue new futures.
Dates, Times, & Location
Day 1: Darkness & Rebellion
Friday, October 24th – Colored Girls Dormitory at Gottschalk Hall at 6 pm
Day 2: Threshold
Saturday, October 25th – Playhouse Theater at 7 pm
Day 3: Sacred
Sunday, October 26th – Speed Art Museum at 3 pm
vanessa german Artist Bio
vanessa german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI) is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. Establishing her own self-taught approach and distinctive artistic language, german’s influential practice employs mineral crystals, beads, glass, found objects, and other sourced material to create expressive figurative sculptures that resound through the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her unique sculptural vocabulary transmits healing energy, affirming the power of love as an infinite human technology.
She has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at the NSU Art Museum (2024-25), Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago (2024), The Contemporary Dayton (2023), Montclair Art Museum (2023), Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum (2022), The Frick Pittsburgh (2021), Rockefeller Center (2020), Flint Institute of Arts (2019), among other museums. She has participated in group exhibitions at the National Mall, ICA Philadelphia, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Norton Museum of Art, and Albright-Knox Northland. Her work is held in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Mt. Holyoke College Museum of Art, South Hadley, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY.
V.C.R (Veronica Camille Ratliff) is a three-time Grammy-nominated recording artist, violinist, composer, and sound artist from Memphis, Tennessee. A graduate of USC’s Thornton School of Musicwith a Master’s in Composition and recipient of the Presser Award, she fuses her Southern gospel roots with orchestral precision and experimental sound design. Her artistry has taken her to world-class stages, including Coachella, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Afropunk, and the Super Bowl LVI NFL Honors. Through her immersive sound experiences, she merges classical orchestration, field recordings, and experimental soul to explore memory, ritual, and collective healing through sound. Her work has been presented in major art institutions, including Jeffrey Deitch, The Getty Museum, The Broad, and The Underground Museum. As both a performer and composer, V.C.R has collaborated with visionary artists such as André 3000, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, the Alice Coltrane Family, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Brittany Renee is a multi-hyphenate creative currently based out of her hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. A classically trained dancer by trade, she has grown her skillset to include choreography, teaching, performance poetry, written poetry, and creative direction. Brittany is an alum of the Kentucky Center Governor’s School for the Arts, the Youth Performing Arts School, and the University of Kentucky Dance program. She has danced with Keen Dance Theatre, Derby City Latin Dance, Baile Paris, and frequently performs in theatre, dance, and poetry shows locally. She also freelance instruct salsa, bachata, and modern dance and recently published her first poetry collection, Finding Phillis on the Dark Side of the Moon, in October 2024. Her work has been featured with Canvas Rebel Magazine, Afrique Noir Magazine, Bold Journey Magazine, and All Def Poetry.
Michaiah (Kiah) Peebles, was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Peebles began dancing at the age of six and currently dances with Keen Dance Theatre and Destined Dance Company. Outside of dancer she works at Tippi Toes Louisville, helping young dancers build confidence through movement.
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