2020 Faculty Biennial Profile: Avigail Mannenberg

Meet the artists of the 2020 MCAD Faculty Biennial

My art—like my life—is based on the story of my family, the history of my generation, my culture, what I see, and those I meet. The German accent of my paternal family and the American accent of my maternal family both immigrated to Israel combined with my present Israeli accent while living in the USA is a symbol for my art on generational efforts to assimilate. The skepticism manifested in my work is a product of my multicultural Israeli upbringing in a country that hasn’t yet fully defined itself and the influences of being an expatriate in Germany and the USA. This instability of identity linked to nationalism in today’s world causes me to question the cultural reality around me whether I am in America, Israel, or Germany. Through the act of self displacement I lived in Europe, the Middle East, and the USA. I explore self-definition and global identity issues in my art.

When I make comparisons of my inherited rituals to the surroundings in each new place, I thereby displace my own individual perspective on life. Through such experiences, my art is continually enriched by new vocabulary of mixed cultures and seeks to break through conventional borders imposed by locals/natives. In absorbing the world through interacting with others, I take something unfamiliar from their background and filter it through my visual language into something collectively understandable. The search to define myself motivates my passion to create. It is essential to me to keep a wide visual vocabulary in my work. Each medium I choose to use is in correlation with my subject of investigation. I’m searching for the right form to elaborate the content. Drawing and painting, video, sound, thread and other mixed media are found materials in my work.

About Avigail Manneberg

Avigail Manneberg is a Minneapolis-based artist. She works in varied media, such as painting, drawing, video, and performance. Her work is in direct response to personal and global life events for example the chaos experienced by those fleeing conflict. “At a time of continual flux, my art grapples with national and cultural identity through the case study of my own history in relation to my home country of Israel.”

Manneberg received her Bachelor in Design from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2006 and her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2012. Since then she has been teaching studio arts at the University of Minnesota and at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She lived in Berlin in 2009, 2015, and 2017, supported by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowships, where she studied at the University of the Arts (UdK).

Manneberg is a member of the Rosalux Art Gallery Collective. She has exhibited her work at galleries, universities, and museums in the US and internationally, including in Finland, Berlin, Cyprus, Beijing, and Israel. Manneberg is the recipient of 2018 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Visual Arts grant the University of Minnesota's 2018 Human Rights Initiative Grant for her project A Contested Home: Memory, Commemoration and Rights around Forced Migration of Palestinians in the Galilee.