Vanessa Cross' art is deeply rooted in place, memory, and inheritance, particularly within the Southern California landscape. Working in oil, acrylic, and printmaking, she explores this unique region as both a physical environment and a cultural crossroads—where ocean light, urban sprawl, desert edges, and lived histories intersect. These landscapes are not mere backdrops; they serve as active witnesses, holding stories of migration, resilience, and transformation.
Drawing from her African American heritage, my practice honors traditions of endurance, improvisation, and visual storytelling. Through layered surfaces, rhythmic mark-making, and a balance between abstraction and representation, I strive to reclaim space—both geographic and historical—within landscapes where Black presence has often been overlooked or rendered invisible.
Printmaking allows me to engage repetition and variation as metaphors for lineage and collective memory, while painting offers a more intuitive, embodied response to light, color, and atmosphere. Together, these processes reflect the tension between permanence and change, solitude and community, belonging and displacement.
Ultimately, my work aims to create visual spaces where landscape and identity are inseparable—inviting viewers to reconsider how history lives in the land, and how cultural memory shapes the way we see, move through, and claim the world around us. Through Vanessa Cross' art, you can transform your interior spaces into reflections of these intricate narratives.
