Gray Center Exhibition Fellowship

vanessa german’s 2024 Gray Center fellowship intertwined teaching, community engagement, and her first solo Chicago museum show, grounding her socially driven, place‑based practice in the city. Using the Gray Center Lab as her studio while co‑teaching the interdisciplinary course “Paraäcademia — Art, Spirituality, and Social Healing,” with the Gray Center’s Zachary Cahill, she guided students through meditations, healing spells, and investigations of mysticism and the occult. Insights from this paraäcademic collaboration shaped a new body of multimedia works that treat art as a technology of collective healing and love, which became the foundation for her fellowship exhibition co-curated by Zachary, Stephanie Cristello, and Mike Schuh at the Logan Center in 2024.

vanessa german is a self‑taught “citizen artist” whose multidisciplinary practice—spanning sculpture, performance, communal ritual, installation, and photography—advances creativity and tenderness as tools for social healing in the face of structural racism, heteropatriarchy, and misogynoir. Her signature “power figures,” inspired by Congolese Nkisi traditions and assembled from locally sourced materials, fuse Black power, spirituality, mysticism, and feminism into protective ritual forms. german’s art is inseparable from her activism: she founded Pittsburgh’s Love Front Porch (2011) and ARThouse (2014), community‑based hubs that embody her belief in art‑making as restorative justice and a path toward the “wild freedom” demanded by her identity as a queer Black woman. Click here for a more extensive artist bio, including exhibition history.

Click here to read the original announcement and see more detail about this fellowship program.

Course

Paraäcademia: Art, Spirituality, and Social Healing

ARTV 262201
Winter 2024

Paraäcedemia is a set of knowledge bases that typically exist outside of officially recognized institutions of higher learning. It is the space where new, heretofore unknown forms of art may come into being and underrecognized traditions thrive. Coinciding with visiting artist vanessa german‘s 2023- 24 residency at the Gray Center, this experimental and interdisciplinary seminar will explore various schools of mysticism,  art as a form of social healing, the political histories and methodologies of witchcraft, the aesthetics of the occult, and the technics of the supernatural  A number of guest speakers from various backgrounds will lecture, join discussions and participate in class critiques. Assignments include weekly readings and an updated Google doc of class notes,  two short writing assignments, one on a para-academic thinker, and a creative writing assignment based on your own para-academic practice/interest/experience, along with dedicated weekly studio time in class. A final project of the student’s choice may be a research paper (10–12 pages) or a creative project with a choice of medium.