vanessa german is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. Establishing her own self-taught approach and distinctive artistic language, german’s influential practice employs mineral crystals, beads, glass, found objects, and other sourced material to create expressive figurative sculptures that resound through the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her unique sculptural vocabulary transmits healing energy, affirming the power of love as an infinite human technology. Channeling precolonial and African diasporic traditions, her figures allude to the Kongo nkisi nkondi, each charged by the protective and restorative spirits that complement their physical materials. Guided by her own creativity, imagination and curiosity, german follows her intuition about the capacity for objects to tell stories, creating sculptures that resonate deeply with those who encounter them.
The artist’s practice is intertwined with her history of activism and community leadership. Crediting her mother, the fiber artist Sandra Keat German, with inspiring her sense of creative purpose, german realized her first power figures on the front porch of her home, where she would invite neighbors to join her. She would soon found the arts initiative Love Front Porch in 2011 before establishing ARThouse, combining a community studio and artist residency for her neighbors, in 2014. german has received numerous accolades over the course of her career, including the Joyce Foundation Fellowship (2024), Heinz Award for the Arts (2022), Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018), United States Artist Grant (2018), Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2015).
