For vanessa german, ‘Citizen Artist,’ Creativity Is a Matter of Survival

When I sat down to interview the artist vanessa german in her bright, airy temporary studio at the University of Chicago, she was the one who asked the first question. And the second, and the third. She wanted to know who I was and what motivated me in my work and life. She listened to my answers so intently that I was momentarily unnerved.

When I finally asked her how she became an artist, she said, “I might cry, but I’ll just keep going.”

The exchange with german (who styles her full name in lowercase letters) distilled much about her self-taught approach. Her beaded totemic sculptures, some modeled on African power figures, along with an installation on the National Mall, her community-based activism and her collaborative performances have lately been garnering art world attention and major awards.

One of the threads that connects her varied interests is a belief that art can restore our capacities to love ourselves and our communities — but only after we confront traumas and injustices, past and present, that stand in the way of such care. Another is her preternatural capacity for empathy.

Her friend and occasional artistic collaborator Deesha Philyaw, the author of “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” says that during their first meeting, she quickly learned: “No small talk. No bull. No nothing less than 100 percent genuine, 100 percent honest, 100 percent vulnerable.”

Since January german has brought that sensibility to the classrooms of the Gray Center for Art and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, where she taught a course called “Paraäcademia,” which sought to blur the boundaries between art, magic, spirituality and knowledge.

She had never taught in such a setting before. In fact, she attended college only briefly at the University of Cincinnati in the aughts. She managed to make it to the dean’s list — even though she was homeless at the time. (She did receive an honorary doctorate from Bates College in 2021.) At Chicago, rather than ask students to complete a standard syllabus, she challenged them to “contribute energetically” through meditation, ritual, music and movement. After class, german would immediately sketch the ideas that grew from classroom interactions, and then head to the studio to start work on sculptures. These form the basis of her new show, on view through Dec. 15, at the university’s Logan Center for the Arts.

“The course broke down every barrier and structure of how things are supposed to be taught,” said Zachary Cahill, a curator of the exhibition, who also taught the seminar alongside german. “She asked students to consider knowledge that exists but that isn’t taught to us in schools — ancestral knowledge or things being communicated to us in nonacademic ways.” After experiencing it, Cahill added, “It’s hard to think of going back.”

A centerpiece is “The Healer,” a monumental sculpture that draws, like many of her works, on the Congolese Nkisi or power figure as well as on African American folk traditions. Large clay beads, ultramarine with a gold stripe, dangle from a massive, headless body; each contains a piece of paper on which students wrote prayers and spells directed toward themselves and their community. A smaller figure, encrusted with gold beads, quartz, doll hands and much else sits on its shoulders. “Love Song, or The Quelling of that Great Grief of Immortality” (2024) is a giant head with staring eyes, fleshy lips and a broad nose covered with rose quartz. A rivulet of amethyst tears runs down its face.

She made “Heart-Opener,” a mirrored gold pyramid topped with a cluster of white quartz, as a homage to the musician Sun Ra, who developed his Afrofuturist ideas while living in Chicago; she describes him as a spectral presence in her studio. There are altars both of veneration and healing: to the professor Walter E. Massey, with whom she discussed the relationship between traditional African knowledge and contemporary science, but also to the ride-share driver who gave her advice on how to survive in Chicago, and the delivery guys who scammed her out of $700.

Her wall labels include mention of the material and the ephemeral. “Master Blaster, or Boombox from the Fifth Dimension” (2024) is composed of lapis and other gemstones, but also “the sound of love as found in the frequencies of the mineral world” and “love and grief with no space between them.”

German enfolds all parts of her experience into her work, said Stephanie Cristello, a curator of the exhibition, adding that she “has an ability to channel any issue, whether intimate and personal or universal.”

Her childhood took her from Milwaukee to Los Angeles to Ohio. Her father, who was adept at math and computers, worked his way up the ladder at several corporations, including Schlitz Brewery and Heinz. Her mother, the professional quiltmaker Sandra German, who died in 2014, would leave art supplies on the dining table for german and her four siblings, telling them to “make stuff.”

“I grew up with a euphoria around the creative magic I could have,” german said. “I realized that to be alive and to be a human being is to have the ability to make things and experience transformation through that process.”

Her mother’s encouragement went hand in hand with her insistence that her children learn to speak up for themselves, which perhaps inspired german to take on the label of “citizen artist” later: Some of her earliest memories involve protesting Ronald Reagan’s policies in El Salvador and addressing the Los Angeles County Board of Education at public meetings when she was only 6 or 7 years old.

Her life story touches on some of the darker corners of American history: Her grandfather was one of the subjects of the infamous Tuskegee experiment and died of syphilis. She learned to use her first, secondhand camera from none other than the commercial photographer James Van Dyke Evers. She later discovered that he was the son of the assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers. In her teens, her family relocated to Loveland, Ohio, where the Ku Klux Klan was still active; her family’s house was defaced with racist graffiti that her mother refused to remove. “No, people get to walk by,” she told her children. “They have to see this.”

After her brief stint at college she moved to the Homewood area of Pittsburgh, a Black neighborhood that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, according to the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. There she worked for under-resourced nonprofit organizations, teaching art to public schoolchildren. “They had enough to keep their staff going but not enough to change the landscape,” she said.

“When I went home from work, I was witnessing the same murders as my students were. I was watching the same unraveling of their families that my job was supposed to help fix.”

Her longstanding depression had made her suicidal, she said. She left nonprofit work. “I really needed to keep myself alive,” she said. To revive herself mentally, spiritually, and even financially, she made art — gathering materials (glass bottles, an old ironing board, a broken chair) from walks in her neighborhood and assembling them into her first power figures on her front porch. The process allowed her to connect to the world and to others. “I was trying to find a feeling, and then listen to that feeling,” she explained.

After a while, when the kids from the neighborhood became curious about what she was up to, she did what her mother had done years before — handed them materials and encouraged them to get creative. “They started to come every day,” she said. “At 8 o’clock in the morning I would hear ‘Miss Vanessa, is the porch open?’” Her house in Pittsburgh became a gathering place for their parents, too. It came to be known as the ArtHouse.

Around the same time, New York dealers started selling her art, allowing her to get her water turned back on and pay her electricity bills, as well as keep her porch open. “What I found out is that I could keep myself alive — I could do what feels right and sustain myself,” she said. Creativity was a form of survival.

With the help of a social worker, she was able to relocate the ArtHouse to a low-income housing property in 2014; later, she bought another house in the neighborhood to provide space for a community center. She has put her own money from various awards — including the United States Artists grant and a prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum — into the project. But in 2021, a fire heavily damaged the structure. After Covid and other delays, the building is being reconstructed as housing for artists.

In retrospect, german said the community project was “intensely joyful” but unsustainable for one person and a few of her friends. She moved out of Pittsburgh, eventually settling in Asheville, N.C., where she now lives and works.

She uses the term “social healing” to describe the role art can play in communities, one that she acknowledges is no easy task. “For Vanessa, the invitation to love each other is a really radical one,” said Salamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large for The New York Times and one of the curators of “Beyond Granite,” an exhibition in 2023 on the National Mall in Washington that commissioned german to contribute a monument to the African American contralto Marian Anderson. “Her art has to do a lot of work to get us to that point,” Tillet added. “It has to be aware of the historical reasons why we may not love each other. It has to heal us as we’re witnessing it and actively participating in it. And then it has to enable us to connect to each other and to the vision of the past, present, and future that she’s giving us.”

In the gallery, I asked german why she didn’t add sound to “Master Blaster,” her lapis and sapphire boombox, as she has done with other works on occasion. “It doesn’t have sound but it has a frequency, and because it’s lapis,” she said, “the frequency is healing.”