Schedule your gallery tour of In Case I’m Not Here Tomorrow by Vanessa Lekule

On view through August 29!

Join us at the Radial Arts Center for a tour of Vanessa Lekule’s solo exhibition “In Case I’m Not Here Tomorrow.”

ARTIST STATEMENT
“In Case I’m Not Here Tomorrow” is not a farewell. It’s an urgent call to the present.

What if everything I believe is worth saying is already in the work? My thoughts on beauty, control, joy, chaos, and mourning—all illustrated through color, surface, and form. Could the compositions I leave behind be a lasting legacy? Could the marks outlive the conversations I’ve had, the colors bring joy where I may have brought pain?

I often think about the inescapable truth that one day I will leave this world. What of me will remain? Maybe these paintings don’t offer answers—perhaps they hold contradictions. Forgiveness, empathy, love, anger—all at once. Using oil, pastel, collage, and pencil, I layer opposing elements—structure and chaos, softness against harshness—into compositions that speak without needing to explain.

This is a visual journal of now: of what is being felt, seen, and experienced in real time. In Case I'm Not Here Tomorrow.

ARTIST BIO
Vanessa Lekule (b. Tanzania) is a mixed-media visual artist based in Lincoln, Nebraska. She earned her BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in painting from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she received the Shelly Arnold Waggoner Memorial Scholarship and the Jean R. Faulkner Memorial Art Exhibition Award.

Lekule has been awarded residencies at the Black Mountain College Active Archive Residency (NC), Tofte Lake Center (MN), and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (NE), among others. Her work has been exhibited at the Burkholder Project Gallery, Tugboat Gallery, and the LUX Center for the Arts.