This Sunday, Paul Artspace resident Jessie Donovan will depart for a month-long artist residency in Stuttgart, Germany, as part of an artist exchange program in partnership with the Sister Cities St. Louis–Stuttgart organization and the GEDOK art center.
It’s not the first time that Donovan will travel to Germany. While attending the University of Missouri–Columbia, the St. Louis artist studied there, in addition to assisting with a linguistic project in Kenya and Eastern Uganda.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
“I spent a considerable amount of time studying or working in both Germany and Kenya, enough to feel a connection to the people and their cultures,” she says. “As a biracial person, both countries felt like home. Unfortunately, there’s no documentation of where my ancestors in Africa came from, so I use Kenya as a representation of that continent. To the same effect, I use Germany to represent Europe, because I spent five months studying there. I was always interested in the categorization of humans and plants, so I really started to focus on how we view Europeans and Africans throughout history.”
Today, Donovan’s work considers the history of categorization and exploring issues of identity. “The invention of the printing press revolutionized the dissemination of information by allowing the written word to have a more definitive place in the world of knowledge. Thus, the age of labeling, order, and categorization was born,” says Donovan. “My work questions and delegitimizes the role of official documents in the creation of forming identity. Throughout human history, lives, laws, and medicine have been greatly controlled by ethnology, taxonomy, and general classifications and categorizations.”
Using myriad methods—copper etchings, serigraphy, chalk pastel, charcoal, paper collage, video, and silk-screening—she creates work with layers of material and meaning. Her work calls into question the validity of certain systems of categorization and how “words replace words, and while we may redefine, we can always see traces of that misinformation.”
Donovan is among a select group of visual artists and writers who are part of the Paul Artspace artist’s residency, which provides living quarters and studios in a wooded 5.6 acres in North County. Founder and director Michael Behle says, “The Sister Cities Exchange–Stuttgart is a great example of the international connectivity that Paul Artspace values and works to develop for our artists and community.”
