vanessa german is the inaugural Joyce Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago's Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. A self-taught citizen artist, vanessa german works across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.

A visual storyteller, german utilizes assemblage and mixed media, combining locally found objects to build protective ritualistic structures known as her power figures. Modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and drawing on folk art practices, they are embellished with materials including beading, glass, fabric, and sculpted wood, and come into existence at the axis on which Black power, spirituality, mysticism, and feminism converge.

Her artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch in Pittsburgh, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the Homewood neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german expanded the space to encompass ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency. Upholding artmaking as an act of restorative justice, german confronts the emotional and spiritual weight imposed by the multi-generational oppression of African American communities. As a queer Black woman living in the United States, german has described this as a deeply necessary process of adventuring into the wild freedom that the inhabitation of such identities demands.

In 2022, german was awarded the Heinz Award for the Arts. Other awards include the Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2018; the United States Artist Grant, 2018; the Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2017; and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, 2015. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions …please imagine all the things i cannot say… at the Montclair Art Museum (2023); Beyond Granite: Pulling Together at the National Mall in Washington D.C. (2023); In these truths at Buffalo AKG (2022); Reckoning: Grief and Light at The Frick Pittsburgh (2021); sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and The Union for Contemporary Art (2019), originally on view at Mattress Factory (2018); and Black: Color, Material, Concept at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2015).

Her work is held in private and public collections including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI and Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA. 

In August 2023, german unveiled a new commission for the exhibition Beyond Granite: Pulling Together at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Exploring the role of monuments in the telling of American history, the exhibition marked the first organized group art exhibition ever staged on The National Mall. She is represented by Kasmin, New York. vanessagerman lives and works between Pittsburgh, PA, and Asheville, NC.