vanessa german | Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition | Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago

vanessa german - Photograph by Joshua Franzos
 

Vanessa German
Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition
Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago
July 19 - December 15, 2024

By SHANA NYS DAMBROT December 4, 2024

I started trying to write about this show a long time ago, almost as soon as it opened. I was in Chicago on family business, and by good fortune I knew about this show and was able to make a point of seeing it. Then I was going to interview german, but right when we were trying to schedule it, Hurricane Helene landed hard on Asheville, NC—which along with Pittsburgh, PA, german calls home— and I wasn’t about to press the matter. But here’s the thing—the exhibition’s themes were playing out in real time, in her voice and emotion, in her philosophy and activism, in her self-care and righteous advocacy. In short, in the form of her moving, thoughtful, and impassioned responses she was posting on her IG as the situation unfolded. Her way(s) of stepping up for her community offered the very embodied soul of the energies at work in her career and this exhibition in particular; I didn’t need to interview her (though I’d have loved to) about the ideas behind the work, I was watching them unfold in public. And in a way, because she radiates a gentle magic in her voice and manner, and because she often convocates with prayerful song and poetry, these genuine, personal appeals also held some of the same power as her ceremonial performances.

Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.

But let’s back up for a moment. The artist vanessa german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI) lives and works between Pittsburgh and Asheville. In each location she is the fulcrum of innovative creative communities, and her studio practice itself is intentionally defined as one of citizenship as well as art-making, and always calibrated from a community perspective. At the same time, her sculptural aesthetic is one of exuberant matriarchal adornment, an additive and omnivorous take on mixed media, tapping into contemporary visual culture, art historical pageantry, and ancestral ritual and high-vibration mediums like gemstones and minerals, shells, certain textiles, precious metals, and refractive light. Music and literature as well as folklore and mythology inform her narratives, which frequently have their roots in autobiographical or family events, but always expand to include their broader social and political implications. Her best known works are sometimes intimate and sometimes towering altarpieces in female form and, more recently, majestic and precious works rendering figures and meaningful objects—sometimes at nearly monumental scale—in opulent, tactile, glimmering rose quartz.

Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.

Featuring a new body of sculptures in both modalities, this presentation at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, culminates her semester residency as a Fellow with the Gray Center for Art & Inquiry, during which she researched, created, and also taught. The whole fellowship was organized around the concept of paraäcademia, which recognizes the value of magic, spirituality, somatic and epigenetic knowledge, intuition, and love alongside more conventional forms of institutional learning. Artifacts and course materials from her teaching sessions are on view in a room adjacent to the main exhibition. From high school to undergraduate and MFA students, I would imagine that the arrival of a strong and gentle theatrical presence in the classroom whose desire is to reorient art practice toward a place of beauty, joy, uplift, mourning, and mutual support—one in which lived experience and intergenerational wisdom are foundational—would be memorable for them.

The Healer is an example of german’s monumental scale figures that are both effigy and embodiment. Feminine in their curvaceousness, the architectural body does not have a head; instead a smaller figure perches on its shoulders. This centerpiece work combines elements of both vectors of her signature totemic figure—her heavily beaded, textile and paper, paint and costume-adjacent way of building figures; combined with the more gemstone-encrusted, quartz-skinned opulence of luxurious religious aesthetics. Like much of her work, elements from both African tradition and African American folk art blend, if not seamlessly, then at least fabulously—but german still leaves herself plenty of room to take obvious pleasure in experimenting with a dazzling array of shapes, textures, and materials.

(left side) vanessa german, Love Song; or The Quelling of that Great Grief of Immortality (2024), Courtesy of the artist. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.

Love Song, or The Quelling of that Great Grief of Immortality (2024) is an instantly iconic colossal rose quartz head. It’s arrestingly, aggressively gorgeous, crying a delicate stream of amethyst tears, the sumptuous work is like something excavated from a hidden temple—one definitely dedicated to the worship of a goddess of love and compassion. Plausibly ancient even as it responds directly to pressing matters of today, its physical qualities are hypnotic, its beauty sublime, its strength has already endured millennia. A larger than life Lapis lazuli boombox, a scrying headdress riffing on basketball hoops that is properly fit for a queen, offbeat sports-adjacent tableaux with a carnivalesque flair—these and a number of other works each take their time with dedication to their backstory, but also offer unusual sensory cues—german’s subjects are heavy, unsettling, sometimes grieving, but her visual offerings are celebratory, enchanting, elevated, inviting, alive. The work is not beautiful because it avoids trauma—it’s beautiful so that it can heal it. This is the way.

So, I was going to ask her about all that, and how she thought about art’s role in ameliorating these fraught, divided, violent times—I wanted to know more about shadow work, and the bridge between her practice in the studio, her place in the art historical continuum, and what it looks like when all that is translated into embodied action out in the world, with strangers, and collaborations, and current events. I wanted to know how she managed to still center love and care amid all this chaos in the world. But then, instead of just telling me over zoom what she was thinking, german went and shared it all with everyone, and that was more lovely and more exact than any interview answer. Anyway the show is up through the middle of December if you happen to be in Chicago. It's truly a blessing to experience it in person. And Asheville is doing much better now, as well. WM

loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu/exhibitions/vanessa-german