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.