Joyce Foundation Fellowship
With the intention of bringing together the conceptual manifestation of her visual art practice and community activism, vanessa german’s fellowship fittingly unfolded across multiple directions: a course in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Arts, her first solo museum exhibition in Chicago hosted by Logan Center Exhibitions, an associated programming series, and a special edition of the Portable Gray Journal. Through multimedia sculptures, performances, and installations, german seeks to dismantle the perceived separation of people, places, and things. german’s inherently itinerant practice has grown through her commitment to conceiving and exhibiting work in ways that specifically engage with place. Following recent presentations of her processional piece, BLUE WALK, at the National Mall in Washington’ D.C., Omaha, NE, Pittsburgh, PA, and Portland, OR, the artist’s capacity to move through the world as an instrument of social healing was given a new platform in Chicago
In the winter of 2024, the Gray Center Lab became vanessa german’s studio as she worked toward her exhibition while also co-teaching with the Gray Center’s Zachary Cahill as the visiting artist for the interdisciplinary studio/seminar course Paraäcademia — Art, Spirituality, and Social Healing. With a focus on vanessa german’s concept of The Artist as Wholeness, the course looked at 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 come into being and underrecognized traditions thrive. Coinciding with visiting artist vanessa german’s residency at the Gray Center, this experimental and interdisciplinary seminar explored 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. The artist worked with students on weekly meditations, the creation of healing spells, and imagining new zones of pedagogy generated from their own paraäcademic interests (a new term coined to echo ‘parapsychology’ or ‘paranormal’ that addresses bodies of knowledge and practices that have been historically excluded from academia).
The course served as a primary focal point for the new body of work that german produced from her engagement with students, faculty, and Chicago community members, giving form to what a spiritual practice of art looks like today. Guided by the principal of paraäcademia, the exhibition enacts various spells both intended for and composed by the living breathing people encountered during her residency. Created over the course of several months, the works on view embody the site of Chicago as an energetic locus for production—foregrounding the interpersonal linkages formed through art as a form of social healing, meditations on the political histories and methodologies of magic, and spiritual activations that embrace love as an original and infinite human technology.
The exhibition is titled At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s., was curated by Zachary Cahill (Director of Fellowships and Programs, The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry and Editor-in-Chief, Portable Gray), Mike Schuh (Associate Director of Fellowships and Operations, The Gray Center, and Senior Editor, Portable Gray) and Stephanie Cristello (Freelance Curator and Contributing Editor, Portable Gray), in partnership with the Logan Center’s exhibitions team, and runs from July 19 – December 15, 2024. More information and documentation can be found at Logan Center Exhibitions.
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. vanessa german lives and works between Pittsburgh, PA, and Asheville, NC.
Presenting Partners
The Joyce Foundation
The Joyce Foundation is a nonpartisan private foundation that invests in public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region.
www.joycefdn.org
Logan Center Exhibitions
Logan Center Exhibitions presents international contemporary art programming at the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Reflecting the spirit of inquiry at the university, Logan Center Exhibitions focuses on open, collaborative, and process-based approaches to cultural production. Working closely with artists, students, scholars, and community members, Logan Center Exhibitions presents innovative exhibitions by emerging and established artists; supports ambitious new commissions and research projects; disseminates knowledge through publications; and facilitates connections through talks and other public programs. More information on the exhibition and visiting Logan Center Exhibitions can be found here.