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 by exploring the evolution of creative power and practice as citizen artist through activism, revolutionary love, and expanded consciousness.
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.
german has received numerous accolades over the course of her career, including the Joyce Foundation Fellowship, Heinz Award for the Arts, Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, United States Artist Grant, Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at the NSU Art Museum, Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, The Contemporary Dayton, Montclair Art Museum, Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, The Frick Pittsburgh, The Union for Contemporary Art, Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Flint Institute of Arts, Figge Art Museum, Mattress Factory, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, among other museums. She has participated in group exhibitions at major venues including The National Mall, ICA Philadelphia, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG, and elsewhere.
Presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan.
Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.