Olney Gleason is pleased to announce vanessa german has received a 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellowship from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
The Joan Mitchell Fellowship annually recognizes and supports 15 US-based artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture. Encompassing long-term financial support, skills development, and community building, the multi-year Fellowship structure provides critical resources that artists need to sustain their practices.
The Fellowship provides each artist with $60,000 in unrestricted funds, distributed over the course of five years. The financial support is interwoven with learning, peer engagement, and network-building opportunities, tailored by staff based on the artists' interests and feedback. The offerings include in-person and virtual convenings; workshops on finance, legacy planning, and self-advocacy; and consultations with arts professionals. The depth of each artist's participation directly impacts their experience of the Fellowship. Fellows in the fourth year of the program and beyond are also eligible to apply for a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.
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.
She has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at the Speed Art Museum (2026), The Colored Girls Museum (2026), 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.
