Cheryl Wassenaar

Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who investigates language as a system of meaning that is dependent upon arrangement and context. Her latest body of work uses sign maker’s vinyl alongside manipulated objects, sound, and video to activate environments in site-specific installations, often collaborating with a writer or poet. Wassenaar’s object-based pieces work with found commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of failed communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting, contemporary advertising, and technology. Merging aspects of graphic design, painting, and sculpture, the work evokes visual stutters of sounds, ideas, and data. 

Wassenaar earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and her master of fine arts from the University of Cincinnati. Her corporate commissions include Camden Real Estate headquarters in Houston, Fidelity Investments in Boston, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. Wassenaar primarily teaches courses in foundational design, color and culture, and methodology in the Sam Fox School’s College & Graduate School of Art.