Currently a visiting professor at Spelman College, she is an Emory University Arts and Social Justice Fellow whose recent exhibitions include the Atlanta Biennial at Atlanta Contemporary (2021), “Holding Space for Nobility: A Memorial for Breonna Taylor” at the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill (2020) and “ Lit Without Sherman” at Hammonds House Museum (2019). But given the questions that have informed her installations, paintings, live performances, photography, video and monumental sculptural figures over a 15-year career - questions that address her sense of responsibility as a steward of all living things - the Atlanta native’s participation in the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures show seems inevitable.Ī firm believer that art is the only vehicle to mend humanity’s self-inflicted wounds, Gay considers herself “a hostess of the work” that draws upon ritual, personal memory, storytelling, fantasy and the deep well of Southern Black traditions.
“I was spastic, overwhelmed and could not believe I got the opportunity,” says the multimedia artist. Shanequa Gay laughs when recalling her first response to the news that she’d been invited to exhibit her work at the Biennale.
