About the Artist

Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who explores the function of text in a hybrid practice of painting, sculpture, and design. She works primarily with found and fabricated commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting and contemporary advertising. Her latest body of work uses signmaker's vinyl and manipulated objects for site-specific installations, often collaborating with a writer or poet.

Wassenaar received her BFA from Calvin College and her MFA from the University of Cincinnati. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in over fifty group and solo exhibitions. Her corporate collections include Camden Real Estate headquarters in Houston; Fidelity Investments in Boston; and Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI. Her work was selected for Studio Visit 2009 and the quarterly Midwest 2002: New American Painters, published by Open Studios Press. Wassenaar is currently represented by LongView Gallery in Washington DC.  She serves as Associate Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Wassenaar CV