vanessa german[1] (born 1976)[2] is an American sculptor, painter, writer, activist, performer, and poet based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Her sculpture often includes assembled statues of female figures with their faces or heads painted black, and a wide range of attached objects, including fabric, keys, found objects, and toy weapons.[3] german is an activist, addressing problems like gun violence and prostitution.[4]
vanessa german was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin[12] and raised in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles[13] and Loveland, Ohio[5] by her mother, Sandra Keat German (1949–2014), a fiber artist,[2]quilter and costume maker.[14] She is the third of five children.[15] She moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2000 and began to perform and exhibit her work locally.[16] She describes her work as heavily influenced by her childhood in Los Angeles, where her mother encouraged the children to make their own clothes, and she was also impacted by the AIDS epidemic and drive-by shootings.[17]
Artistic career
A self-taught artist, much of german's artwork is collage and sculpted assemblages.[16] german's sculptural work frequently includes female figures that she calls "power figures" and "tar babies".[18] She creates them by decorating and painting large dolls and figures, then sculpting outward by adding a wide range of materials including objects like cowrie shells, plastic guns, feathers, bottle caps, seashells, toys, and vintage products.[16] She often uses found and donated materials from her Homewood neighborhood.[2] She discovered that her work included elements similar to the central African tradition of Nkisi nkondi, guardian statues pierced with nails and other materials.[19]
Her materials lists for artworks are often poems in themselves. They may include both the physical (e.g. cloth, paint, keys) and non-tangible materials (e.g. "the names of all the dead boys that I know," "tears").[3] Recurring themes addressed in her work include food, birds, violence, injustice, poverty, and Black Madonna imagery.[20][21] In her artist statement for 2016's dontsaythatshitoutloud, she describes the impact of finding two men murdered outside her house within a four-month period.[22]
Her work includes the symbolic use of color throughout. Describing beads from one work, she said "If they're red, they're holding rage and love simultaneously. If they're white – they're holding ghosts – the presence of your ancestors ...and they're also holding forgiveness and peace."[23]
In 2023, german was one of six artists commissioned to create a temporary installation for the National Mall in conjunction with Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, the first curated art exhibition in the Mall's history. Commissioned by the Trust for the National Mall, National Capital Planning Commission, and National Park Service, german created an assemblage sculpture of African-American singer Marian Anderson for the plaza of the Lincoln Memorial. german's sculpture Of Thee We Sing (2023) memorialized Anderson's performance in the plaza from 1939, hosted after Anderson was denied permission to perform in the segregated DAR Constitution Hall several months prior.[24]
german, like the author bell hooks, stylizes her name in all lowercase. In 2023, she told The Bergen Record that this decision was "a way I level myself without hierarchy."[1]
ARThouse and Love Front Porch
german also led the ARThouse and Love Front Porch, a community art institution, in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA.[7] She started the ARThouse when she needed to start creating artworks on her front porch because her basement ceiling was too low: her large sculptural pieces had to be taken apart to be removed from the basement. After she started working on the porch, ARTHouse was born.[25][2] Neighborhood children began gathering to watch her work. This expanded into a dedicated community art space, which moved twice before moving into its permanent location, a house purchased with donations and proceeds from her art sales,[7] dedicated in December 2015.[16] In 2012, Love Front Porch received a $4,000 grant from the Sankofa Fund of Southwest Pennsylvania, which highlights empowering grass-roots African-American community projects.[26]
german also ran the Tuesday Night Monologue Project at ARThouse, a weekly event where guest artists and members of the community could write and share works with each other.[27]
Homewood was described as "The Most Dangerous Neighborhood in America" by MSNBC journalist, Rachel Maddow.[28] german has said about Homewood, "...that doesn't happen every day. It doesn't happen every week. Most people aren't shooting each other. Most people are not running drugs. It's a very small percentage of the population who are engaging in really extreme activities."[25]
The ARThouse suffered severe damage from a fire in 2021 and was closed to the public. german fundraised to renovate the space but decided to leave Homewood herself and moved to North Carolina, describing the impact of living in a community with significant violence by saying "It became impossible to work there because I was scared so much of the time."[29]
Collections
german's work is held in the following permanent collections:
2016: "i come to do violence to the lie".[35] Solo Exhibit. Matrix new work series. The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Hartford, CT.[36]
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