Carrying Grief and Love at the Same Time with Artist vanessa german
Installation view of vanessa german: SAD RAPPER, September 8 - October 22, 2022. Photograph by Diego Flores. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.
By Emily Alesandrini | March 31, 2025
The Art Critic Fellowship is an art writing intensive program launched in 2025. Over eight weeks, fellows engaged in four lectures led by award-winning editors and writers to discuss the joys and concerns of writing and editing art criticism today, and met one-on-one with their assigned mentors to develop a piece of criticism for publication on AICA-USA’s Magazine.
Emily Alesandrini is part of the 2025 cohort and was paired with Simon Wu as her mentor.
In a room of artist vanessa german’s multimedia sculpture, figures emerge from the assemblage of bottles and beads, shoes and shiny things, porcelain tchotchkes and bird figurines, mirrors and watches, glitter, twine, keys, locks, painted stars, and astro turf. german makes what I’ve come to think of as sculptural collages or object poems with found objects and sourced materials. Again and again, I see textile bits wrapped and tied together into a cacophonous mosaic of bound bundles. Perhaps her most well-known works feature rose and strawberry quartz and other precious gemstones. Faces appear as if mined from spiritual depths in ruby, garnet, and lapis lazuli, as well as sodalite, kyanite, and chalcedony. I started writing about these entities, what german calls power figures, their enigmatic stones and multitudinous pouches, as they relate to what we carry in and on the body. And then, quite suddenly, my Dad died.
With a month-old diagnosis of stage four lymphoma, cancerous lymph nodes grew throughout his body like poisonous little bundles that killed him from the inside. When he died, too soon after my brother, parts of me died too. And now I carry these parts with me, alongside memories of bicycle birthdays and the timbre of his singing voice. My body has become an assemblage of grief and gratitude and so many other heaps and bundles, bruised and heavy and hurting.
In a 2023 conversation with The Slowdown, german wrote: “As a kid, I understood that it was very special to be alive. I understood [...] how momentous it was to have all this energy in human form. I also had this big feeling that I would honor my own life by honoring the deaths of people in my community. I started having secret memorials. Death, you see it in my work.” [1] In this statement, the artist connects early childhood “memorial” projects with her current artistic practice. Her power figures reflect this interest, and serve, perhaps in part, as memorials to the departed and to those who engaged with her objects before she reincarnated them. Some of her sculptures are called: The Weeper (2024); Grief and Love and Grief and Love at the Same Time (2024); This Way; wonder & sweat & love & grief - you are never alone (2017); Spirit portrait of man suffocated to death by police at 44.9363° N, 93.2622° W (2023). Such titles touch upon the ineffable loss and healing that german attempts to articulate in words as well as material.
In her interviews and online presence, german talks about love, about consciousness, about magic. She writes: “I recognized early on in my practice that what you see in the object is a small percentage of the material. I wanted to find a way to include the invisible in the work, so I would put it in the media.” [2] Information about an artwork’s medium is often located in the image/object caption, text that art historians sometimes refer to as the work’s “tombstone,” as if the piece itself were dead. In addition to explicating gemstones and glass beads, german’s listed materials often include substances like:
the blues, sorrow, tears, love, the way that it feels to need to cry but not be able to cry, grief, loneliness, sometimes the day hurts very badly and i struggle to make my mind close out thoughts of despair, images of horror, horror as an awakening, grace bursting out through the splinters of a withered heart, this bitter earth, and just go’on ahead and be broken for a little while.
This is poetry and material and tangible and, in fact, invisible. To write about german’s practice, to write alongside her words, I hope contributes to honoring the invisible that I feel in the work.
The artist’s power figures physically and conceptually echo Congolese minkisi — spiritual figural objects used to cure physical or social ills through medicinal substances and divine consultation. These sculptures are particularly recognizable for the nails and pegs that often penetrate their surfaces. [3] One of the intended functions of these objects, that of healing, resonates in particular with german’s community-based work and goals for her creative practice more broadly. “I’m thinking about healing differently, what it is to have human trauma and for billions of people to share the same heartbreak, which means billions of people can share the same thread of healing.” [4] When she was 21, german became a hospice volunteer to learn more about death and how to better support loved ones embroiled in loss. [5] She seems to weave this “thread of healing” throughout her practice, in how she makes and communicates. Perhaps this is where her power figures get their power.
In the 2010s, german’s home in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA became a community gathering space for art making, local children arriving early in the morning to ask: ‘Miss vanessa, is the porch open?’ [6] The artist funneled personal funds and grant and prize money into this community work until a fire damaged the building in 2021. No one was hurt and the artist thanked local firefighters for their efforts to rescue artwork from the blaze. The building is now slated for artist housing, and german has resettled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. [7] I first reached out to german after the devastating flooding of Asheville’s River Arts district in the wake of Hurricane Helene in October, 2024. She sold small paintings via her Instagram account to support Asheville artists in need.
Looking back, I can’t help but read a painful symmetry in the fragility of these home spaces. The fire and the flood. The loss and the movement. Grief for climate, heaped on grief for Palestine, piled on grief amid cyclical anti-black violence. I sit on a stool at the base of my Dad’s bedroom closet, helping sort too many fishing hats, Christmas ties, flannel shirts bought on sale at JCPenny, a knobbly scarf I knit him in high school, and so many threadbare handkerchiefs. What do we carry with us when the house is burning? What can we bundle on our backs when we run from rising waters? I look to german’s power figures for guidance, and then I begin to pack.
vanessa german, BLUE BOY (The Body of Grief Makes Space and Light), 2023, 53 x 32 x 20 inches. Ingredients: 30 yards of Blue Rip Stop from the first layer of the BLUE WALK prayer skirt which walked the National Mall in August of 2023, wood, heat, grief, sorrow, a torment in the heart which accumulates in the darkening of the winter sky, porcelain tea cup, horror, porcelain monkey with a trumpet, vintage beaded French flowers, hope, lust, a cringing face in the mirror, tears, instagram at 2am when you know you need to be asleep, 12,000 images of horror, terror and destruction that just don’t go away, you know? Love, porcelain figure bust of a white woman in a hat with her hand on her cheek, ceramic flowers, the BLUES do you hear me—THE BLUES, blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue, sometimes the day hurts very badly and i struggle to make my mind close out thoughts of despair, distraction, holiness, folk art bottle cap chain, plaster, a healing to the broken heart, softness, hummingbird book ends, ceramic blue birds, ceramic dolls parts, a pair of some old man’s shoes, horror!!!!, dead bodies and people laughing at it!!!!, horror i tell you horror, blue pigment, blue lace, a blue stove pot, the sound of the artist losing her friends, mannequin hands, loneliness, yarn, wire, twine, beaded rhinestone lace, ugliness as beauty, beauty as horror, horror as an awakening, grace bursting out through the splinters of a withered heart, this bitter earth, flower candelabra, MYSTERIES, humanness, creativity, glory, 7 or 8 miracles, and a ceasefire. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.
[1] Spencer Bailey, “vanessa german on Art as a Way of Life and Love as a ‘Human Technology’”, (The Slowdown, August 17, 2023).
<https://www.slowdown.media/article/the-big-interview-vanessa-german>
[2] Spencer Bailey.
[3] Dr. Shawnya L. Harris and Dr. Peri Klemm, “Power Figure, Nkisi Nkondi, Kongo peoples”, (Khan Academy). <https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/africa-apah/central-africa-apah/a/nkisi-nkondi>
[4] Grace Ebert, “vanessa german On Being Whole and Having a Responsibility to Be Irresponsible”, (Colossal, July 2, 2024). <https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/07/vanessa-german-conversation/>
[5] Spencer Bailey.
[6] Aruna D’Souza, “For a ‘Citizen Artist,’ Creativity Is a Matter of Survival,” (The New York Times, August 10, 2024).<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/arts/design/vanessa-german-artist-sculpture-university-chicago.html>
[7] Bill O'Driscoll, “Artist Vanessa German's Homewood 'ArtHouse' Looks To Rebuild After Fire”, (90.5 WESA, February 19, 2021).
<https://www.wesa.fm/arts-sports-culture/2021-02-19/artist-vanessa-germans-homewood-arthouse-looks-to-rebuild-after-fire>
Emily Alesandrini (she/her) is an arts writer, curator, and art historian working in New Orleans and New York. Her research concerns contemporary representations of race and gender with a particular focus on issues of opacity, ornament, and the diasporic body in art by women and artists of color. Her writing has appeared in ARTnews, The Offing, Burnaway, and BOMB, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Alesandrini graduated from Smith College with a BA in Art History and continues her studies as a doctoral student in Art History at Bryn Mawr College.