vanessa german b. 1976
“One of the threads that connects her varied interests is a belief that art can restore our capacities to love ourselves and our communities”
—Aruna D’Souza, The New York Times
vanessa german is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. Establishing her own self-taught approach and distinctive artistic language, german's influential practice employs mineral crystals, beads, glass, found objects, and other sourced material to create expressive figurative sculptures that resound through the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her unique sculptural vocabulary transmits healing energy, affirming the power of love as an infinite human technology.
Considered inextricable from her identity as an activist, german’s autodidactic artmaking has its lineage in indigenous and West African folk practices as well as Black Arts movements from 1960s onwards. Working primarily with assemblage, german sculpts wood and plaster which she then adorns with a vast range of materials—some found in her community, others sourced from across the country—including prayer beads, doll parts, handmade patterned quilts, skateboards, rope, silk flowers, cowrie shells, coke bottles, vintage porcelain bells, and astroturf. These “ingredients”, as german refers to them, form just one part of each work’s medium, and are listed alongside the metaphysical components that the artist sees as indivisible from the physical objects. Such juxtapositions create complex metaphorical meanings, where the resulting cacophony of language, texture, and image is freighted with both the emotional and the physical; the spiritual and the material. In german’s words, “the objects become both the wound and the medicine.”
german's sculptures are as much defined by their tangible elements as their transcendental properties, a combination which the artist describes as the ingredients of her work. Since the early 2010s, she has assembled ritualistic structures known as power figures using glass, beads, gemstones, nails, wood, and other objects. Whether mineral crystals originating in the earth millennia ago, or cobalt blue bottles resembling those used in bottle tree traditions for generations, every object chosen by german channels frequencies that span its entire existence. Channeling precolonial and African diasporic traditions, her figures allude to the Kongo nkisi nkondi, each charged by the protective and restorative spirits that complement their physical materials. Guided by her own creativity, imagination and curiosity, german follows her intuition about the capacity for objects to tell stories, creating sculptures that resonate deeply with those who encounter them.
The artist's practice is intertwined with her history of activism and community leadership. Crediting her mother, the fiber artist Sandra Keat German, with inspiring her sense of creative purpose, german realized her first power figures on the front porch of her home, where she would invite neighbors to join her. She would soon found the arts initiative Love Front Porch in 2011 before establishing ARThouse, combining a community studio and artist residency for her neighbors, in 2014.
german has received numerous accolades over the course of her career, including the Joyce Foundation Fellowship (2024), Heinz Award for the Arts (2022), Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018), United States Artist Grant (2018), Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2015).
Museum Exhibitions & Collections
She has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at the NSU Art Museum (2024-25), Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago (2024), Mulvane Art Museum (2024), The Contemporary Dayton (2023), Montclair Art Museum (2023), Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum (2022), The Frick Pittsburgh (2021), Rockefeller Center (2020), The Union for Contemporary Art (2019), Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (2019), Flint Institute of Arts (2019), Figge Art Museum (2019), Mattress Factory (2018) and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2016), among other museums. She has participated in group exhibitions at major venues including The National Mall, ICA Philadelphia, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Norton Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Northland, and elsewhere. Her work was included in the publications Great Women Sculptors (Phaidon) and Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (Art Institute of Chicago) in 2024.
Her work is held in the collections of the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Mt. Holyoke College Museum of Art, South Hadley, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; NSU Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS, among other museums.