The centerpiece of German’s FIA exhibit is a mixed-media installation titled Miracles and Glory Abound (2018), a life- sized representation of Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), the iconic painting by Emanuel Leutze. Leutze’s painting is a representation of a foundational story about the birth of America. It is the visual narrative of George Washington leading Continental soldiers across the Delaware River in 1776. German’s Miracles and Glory Abound challenges the Leutze narrative.

“Who gets to shape-shift that story?” German asked her FIA audience. “Who gets to create the images for those stories of American greatness?” German’s take on the Leutze painting is reminiscent of Robert Colescott’s painting, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), in that all the human figures are obviously African American.

“Miracles and Glory Abound with its boat full of figurative sculptures, functions as both a continuation of and a disruption of the canon,” according to Holly Bass, a writer and performance artist.

“She (German) inserts and asserts her Blackness, her womanness, her multivalent queerness, into this ongoing American narrative and asks us to consider the birth of this nation, a mythology of chopped cherry trees and founding fathers lying through wooden teeth.”

“The political meets the spiritual meets the cultural,” German said of Miracles and Glory Abound. “They meet in a way of my understanding of rightness.”