Leaving a Mark: Vanessa Platacis, MFA '05

Vanessa Platacis, MFA ‘05, pulls a respirator over her face and tightens the straps behind her ponytail. Classical music blasts serenely in the background. Instagram is watching.
Spray paint in hand, she’s about to work on her latest project, a large-scale installation spread across, Hotel Bardo, a sumptuous new urban resort and member-only social club opening in Savannah, Georgia.
Her home studio sits on an island just off the coast of the charming Southern city. An unstretched panel leans against the studio wall behind her, a teaser of fronds of foliage stenciled in verdant green. Once completed, the work will be photographed and then printed digitally as high-resolution wallpaper for the hotel’s elevator.
It’s not the first time that Platacis has worked with corporate partners and national art advisors either.
“These partnerships have unexpectedly been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career,” she admits. “I write proposals, do renderings, go for meetings, pitch my artwork, and convince people to fund my project visions.” A site installation artist with roots in street art, Platacis has been perfecting her technique with stencils since 2005, drawing everything by hand on pre-gessoed canvas, a pliable material that can be bent around corners or other architectural details.
From a very young age, she constantly had a pen in her hand–and it was a problem. Her family moved frequently, and they would find her drawings on the floors and walls whenever they packed up their furniture. “I’ve always had a drive to express myself and leave a mark,” she says.
First working with stencils as a middle schooler in the 80s at the height of Basquiat, hip-hop, and B-Boy, B-Girl era, Platacis and her friends would breakdance in parking lots, spray-painting and airbrushing walls in the Southwest.
She says, “The fact that I still work with spray paint and have grounding as a street artist is very much a byproduct of how I grew up. It was a rich period with a strong, creative, and energetic youth culture.” It was no big surprise that she went on to study Painting at the University of New Mexico, setting her sights on continuing through to an MFA.
Platacis chose the School of the Museum of Fine Arts because she wanted to ground her practice in research and a wider network of artists. The conversations that came out of that time, the liberal arts classes she took at Tufts University, and the rich cultural environment of Boston itself was, she says, “quite honestly, life-changing.”
At SMFA, Platacis began to envision all of the possibilities for a future career as a full-time artist and she found a true community. She says, “My peer group was a tremendous group of artists, many of whom I stay in contact with today. They’re studio artists, prominent arts writers, art advisors, and curators and we’re all connected.”
She also learned to spend dedicated time framing a project before cutting a single stencil. “I began to refer to my practice as a research-based practice at SMFA, and that continues to inform every single project that I work on,” Platacis explains.
Whether it’s 4 Pleasant Street or 12 W. State Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Platacis starts every installation by diving into understanding the community that she is entering, looking into the location, history, the context around the built environment, and important imagery and stories that relate to the people who will have a stake in the work.
After SMFA, Platacis spent several years traveling and making work in Europe, figuring out what direction she wanted to take her work before returning to Boston and setting up a studio and teaching visual art at the college level. At one point, Platacis put down street art and published an obituary on X (formerly Twitter) for her alias, Pixnit, an inversion of Pinxit, which is Latin for “he or she paints.”
The obituary went viral when her followers and family members accidentally assumed that Platacis—not her street art practice—had died. She ended up winning Boston Magazine’s annual award for Best Performance Artist as a result.
When Lydia Peabody, a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts approached her with a multi-gallery commission, Platacis began to make artwork again but this time under her real name. An ongoing 2,700 square-foot installation installed in 2019, Taking Place references and “reimagines” beloved works from the Museum’s collection–one ship, chandelier, pearl, and ornately gilded flower at a time.
A pinnacle moment in her career came a few years later when Platacis was given her first six-figure commission. Now it’s one of many.
Platacis believes that by working outside of the gallery system, she has more creative control over who her clients and collectors are and where her painting installations are shown—and to whom.
Platacis’ work sits at the intersection of painting and installation art. “You’re operating outside of traditional systems, making work available to the general public. It is totally dematerialized. We’re not talking about objects that are for sale. We’re talking about experiences,” she said, getting ready to go and create her next one.
Lead image courtesy of the artist. Image by photographer Julia Borges.
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