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 signmaker’s vinyl alongside manipulated objects, sound, and video to activate environments in site-specific installations, often collaborating with a writer or an institution. Wassenaar’s object-based pieces often work with found commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of navigation and communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting, contemporary advertising, and technology.

Wassenaar earned her BFA from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and her MFA 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 College & Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School