4pm | Performance by vanessa german in Washington Park
5–8pm | Opening Reception at the Logan Center for the Arts
6p | Artist Conversation with the Curators

RSVP: https://events.uchicago.edu/event/reception-vanessa-german

The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry presents the first solo museum exhibition in Chicago of self-taught citizen artist vanessa german (b. 1976), opening Friday, July 19, and featuring a new body of monumental rose quartz and precious gemstone sculptures as part of a multi-disciplinary installation developed during her Gray Center Fellowship supported by the Joyce Foundation. Guided by the principal of paraäcademia, a new term coined to address bodies of knowledge and practices historically excluded from recognized institutions of higher education, the exhibition enacts various spells both intended for and composed by the living breathing people encountered during her residency. Created over the course of several months, the works on view embody the site of Chicago as an energetic locus for production—foregrounding the interpersonal linkages formed through art as a form of social healing, meditations on the political histories and methodologies of magic, and spiritual activations that embrace love as an original and infinite human technology.

The exhibition is anchored by four freestanding sculptures intricately encrusted in rose quartz crystal. These sculptures will be shown alongside works of photography and film that straddle the space between meditation and documentary, made during the artist’s Gray Center fellowship. With a focus on what she terms “The Artist as The Complete Technology of Whole Being-ness,” german led an experimental seminar course in the University of Chicago’s Department of Visual Art in the Winter of 2024, implementing a method of teaching that broke down distinctions between art, magic, knowledge, and spirituality. Working with a range of students—from high school to undergraduate, MFA to PhD candidates—the exercises and meditations developed through this course have both informed, and become components of, the exhibition.

As the artist describes:

“There is a monumental rose quartz head. There is also a creature— a four-legged creature with a kind of sigil rising from what would be located as crown-chakra region. (We are thinking here about how the magic takes shapes being that we were intentional with our attentions in this course, so the ideas/visions that were formed came *through* our time together. This is how this creature came through, on a flight to chicago.

There is a large scale master blaster boom box in lapis, sodalite, sapphire, pyrite and glass— thinking about Sun Ra preaching on the corner. The preach-songs of music. The sidewalks soundtracks of freedom and how music is math and math is the universe and Sun Ra was here/there the whole entire time making a womb of his mouth and giving birth to the elements of hip hop along with all of the other humans bursting out of their own ordinary and into entirely new sound forms.

And, then there is a 4 sided pyramid— thinking about the panel discussion that I went to around Sun Ra and all of the other outer-space focused humans who created a universe of their own liberty.

Lastly, in the matter of monumental works we have a double figure which will call into its ingredients the small power beads made throughout our studio time in the course.”

Accompanying 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., a dedicated section of the Spring 2024 edition of Portable Gray, published by the University of Chicago Press, contains a portfolio of recent sculpture, two artist statements that outline the desire to enter “a new cathedral of the academy,” in-depth interviews on her artwork and spirituality, and a selection of hypothetical syllabi prepared by students to imagine their own visions of the course. Across this multifaceted project, the exhibition culminates in allowing new zones of pedagogy to practice a form of spiritual exchange and reciprocity—one that hinges on a very singular type of belief: that trust is its own kind of magic.

The exhibition, presented by the Gray Center and Logan Center Exhibitions, is curated by Zachary Cahill, Stephanie Cristello, and Mike Schuh, with primary support from the Joyce Foundation. Additional support is provided by Richard and Mary L Gray and the Gray Family; Kasmin, New York; the Mellon Foundation; Ng Family Visiting Artist Fund; Revada Foundation; and Friends of the Logan Center.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
vanessa german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI) lives and works between Pittsburgh, PA, and Asheville, NC. Her artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch in Pittsburgh, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the Homewood neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german expanded the space to encompass ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency. Upholding artmaking as an act of restorative justice, german confronts the emotional and spiritual weight imposed by the multi-generational oppression of African American communities. As a queer Black woman living in the United States, german has described this as a deeply necessary process of adventuring into the wild freedom that the inhabitation of such identities demands.

In 2022, german was awarded the Heinz Award for the Arts. Other awards include the Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 2018; the United States Artist Grant, 2018; the Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2017; and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, 2015. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions …please imagine all the things i cannot say… at the Montclair Art Museum (2023); Beyond Granite: Pulling Together at the National Mall in Washington D.C. (2023); In these truths at Buffalo AKG (2022); Reckoning: Grief and Light at The Frick Pittsburgh (2021); sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies. at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and The Union for Contemporary Art (2019), originally on view at Mattress Factory (2018); and Black: Color, Material, Concept at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2015).

Her work is held in private and public collections including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI and Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA. She is represented by Kasmin, New York.

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