Artists Talk with Jessica Sabogal and Shanna Strauss

Taller Sanaaᴙ, (TA - YER SAN- AR), is comprised of life and collaborative partners Shanna Strauss and Jessica Sabogal. Shanna Strauss is Tanzanian - American mixed media artist whose work centers on honoring and uplifting the oral traditions and stories of Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color. Jessica Sabogal is a cuir Colombian - American muralistx from San Francisco whose large-scale public artworks attempt to document and disrupt. Combining printmaking and public art, their collaborative practice draws inspiration, connection, and influence from contemporary political and social movements that have always used artistic expression as a critical form of resistance against forces that wage and risk their erasure. Together they live and work in Oakland, California.

Together, Sabogal and Strauss explore in their newest body of work “This Woman’s Work” the female and non-binary body, making them and their too often unnoticed and unseen labor visible, visual. This collaborative collection depicts women of color existence, voices, tenderness, care-taking, and spaces–not as subjects, rather as centers.

On found wood assemblages as canvas, Sabogal and Strauss’s portrayal of the body, and their attention to creating expansive, geometric auras embrace the women by holding them up and securing them–even as they protect themselves and each other. These patterned auras and orbs contain multiple-colored frequencies, styling and sloping the woodgrain background. It is in these frequencies that the art calls in the viewer to listen, to trace these renderings, to really see women in a conscious effort to know them. In these pieces, we see palimpsests of their change-making work as individual artists. Sabogal and Strauss create an intimate, courageous, and rebellious movement to see that to be revolutionary is to have a holistic love of self and community.