Spiritual Technology

“I know that people are magic,” says vanessa german, who just opened her solo show at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts, organized by the university’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. The artist (who stylizes her name in all lowercase) sums up her boundless approach to making and living with the question “What if site-specificity was a type of love?” A poetic type of love, the exhibition urges, that expands beyond place and encompasses people.

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The soulful new sculptures on display are made from objects and memories shared by students during an experimental course taught by the artist last semester during her residency. There is a four-sided gold pyramid (German’s most minimal work yet), her renowned power figures, installations, and a large-scale boombox formed out of blue precious stones. There are assemblages of clothes and various donated ephemera, and a 5-foot head made with rose quartz sourced from India, Pakistan, China, and Madagascar.

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One of these, THE HEALER, 2024, is, in simplest terms, a small gold figure atop a large ultramarine set of legs—the divine embodiment of feminine and masculine, as the artist puts it—a vision that she first sketched out on the way to the airport after class. Its list of materials is paradoxical, visceral, and enigmatic: wood, marble tile, penis-shaped beads “made by the hands of vanessa, Ashley, Ishmael, Solana, and Anna,” doll parts, “a gory vision of children crushed by buildings in Gaza,” and “prayers to end all military violence on the planet earth.”  Each work’s composites read like a poem. A large lapis sculpture, Master Blaster. Or, boombox from the 5th dimension, 2024, was made from pyrite, sapphire, sodalite, sea jasper, gold glass beads, as well as “Sun Ra’s golden hand rising up the back to carry the night of sounds on his infinite and eternal shoulders."  

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A rose-quartz encrusted head sits atop a stack of boxes in Chicago Altar of Love inspired by the ride-share driver who told me how to make it in Chicago, she says: Don’t be Afraid. Keep Your Eyes Open, 2024. Here, visitors are invited to add small objects or notes of their own. Words ebb and flow like lava through each work, coalescing pointed and political. The same goes for the exhibition’s title "At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s."

Like a quantum particle, german exists in multiple places across multiple planes at once. The multidisciplinary artist and activist was born in Milwaukee and raised first in Los Angeles and then a small town outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her mother, Sandra, a fiber artist and classically trained pianist, and her father, James, an information-technology specialist. Now she is based in Asheville, North Carolina with a studio in Chicago, too. Her practice in some ways is a perfectly inelastic collision of the two paternal influences. Her assemblages are what the artist refers to as “a spiritual technology,” objects that channel the spirit of their process.

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German’s relationship to her craft is cosmic. Her sculptures are shrine-like and meant to be engaged with on a spiritual level. They exalt Black bodies, turn them into monuments and imbue them with a protective force. Over two decades ago, art saved her own life. It gave her a purpose and a sustainable practice that has led her to prestigious awards and acquisitions by major private and public collections alike. With every milestone has come deeper community involvement, too. In 2011, she turned the front steps of her Pittsburgh home into her studio and created the Love Front Porch, an arts initiative for families in the neighborhood. In 2014, she founded the ARThouse next door, a community space with an art studio, garden, outdoor theater, and artist residency. This summer, german collaborated with the Topeka, Kansas community to create "CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love & Reckoning," a touring exhibition of her work and a spoken word operetta that coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision. Now, she continues to bring her philosophy to those around her in Chicago. 

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Students from high school to PhD would arrive at her interdisciplinary seminar at University of Chicago, aptly titled Paraäcademia, pick up a chunk of clay, and mold small beads in their hands as german led a guided meditation. “Today is a good day to consider that the air that you are breathing is alive and has consciousness.” she recalls saying. Each mediation would also serve as a prompt such as “Will you communicate with the air today? Bring me one object that is a physical object, that can sit and to the palm of your hand, and bring me an invisible object that feels magical.” Afterward, german would invite each student to sit across from her in the hallway and present their objects both invisible and tangible.

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“The very first student I sat down with brought this green paper that had been wrapped around an incense container that she got the last time that she was home in Taiwan. The scent would transport her there,” says german. She recalls a particularly moving moment when she asked a shy attendee to sing with her at the front of the classroom. “We stood and held hands, and I let her start. She had a beautiful voice, and I just harmonized with her in a landscape of sound and it was so beautiful and so powerful,” says german. “It was so quiet in the class, it was like we were all in the same sort of sparkly moment.” Afterwards, the student revealed that eye contact was painful for her. The experience had stunned her, and it was emotional for the artist, too. “She thanked me and had a smile on her face that was so big that it looked like it had cracked through her… I hadn't realized what I had asked her to do was oceans beyond what she would have ever done."

As much as the students were transformed by the class, german was also changed. “It taught me that there was more to what I thought a miracle was—this sort of fantastical, celestial, Michelangelo-tinged idea,” she muses. “It was like watching a durational miracle unfurl itself through the lives and bodies and creativity of these human beings.” 

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At Logan Center, one gallery room is filled with an ambient soundscape of mark-making done by the students—oil, pastels, chalk, etched across a long paper that is then ripped and cut, wrapped in fabric and twine until it is transformed into swaddle beads, dipped in plaster and gold leafed. The soundtrack permeates from a table where a film culled from the class’ studio-time is displayed on a screen beneath blue plexiglass. Listen with your mind’s ear, and a symphony of incantations bubbles up from the abstract sounds. “A prayer does not go to sleep,” german emphasizes. “It stays awake and alive and meets the heart and the consciousness of any human being who is open to it.” Each material is charged with the energy of those it touches, and those who touch it. “They are magical objects, and they are artifacts all at the same time of what was happening when they were being made: me and the student holding hands and singing,” she explains. “They are holding that song, holding that ecstatic moment of revelation.”

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"Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition | vanessa german: "At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s." is on view until December 15, 2024 at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago at 915 E 60th St Chicago, IL 60637.