Coffee paper bags and dog food bags, tins, cowrie shells, discarded toys, cutlery and beads. Most of us do not certainly file such objects under the "art" category. Yet such everyday materials become as precious as the finest marble in the hands of Vanessa German. The award-winning artist, sculptor, poet, performer and activist assembles them in complex and intricate ways to create visually striking pieces like the ones that are currently part of the exhibition "Trampoline: Resilience & Black Body & Soul" (until 21st December) at Fort Gansevoort (5 Ninth Avenue, New York).
Born in 1976 in Wisconsin, German grew up in Los Angeles where her mother, a fiber artist, encouraged her and her siblings to be creative.
The artist now lives and works in the Homewood community of Pittsburgh where she founded the community art initiative Love on the Front Porch and ARThouse. The project allows children to explore their artistic skills and saves them from violence as art, German states, has a transformative power. German has also created a performance style called "Spoken Word Opera" that combines operatic drama with contemporary poetry, hip hop and storytelling. 
The artist makes her works employing objects she finds in in Pittsburgh, items that speak to her and that have personal stories to tell. She then proceeds to integrate them into her mixed media sculptures and three-dimensional collages that tackle themes such as gender, identity, injustice, violence, discrimination, racism, worthlessness, Queerness and the oppression of African Americans.
The artist's starting point is Toni Morrison's call at the 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature. In her speech the author invited all writers, and therefore artists as well, to "Make up a story…For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."
German moves from that stitch to create sculptures that she calls "power dolls", statues of female figures with their heads painted black and their bodies made of a wide range of found objects, ingeniously manipulated and cleverly assembled.
The power dolls come in life-size and small scales, they are dressed in skirts made of coffee paper bags or dog food; their bodies incorporate shells and beads, coins and buttons, rusty nails and bottle caps, religious symbols and kitsch statuines; multiple necklaces cover their legs, while cutlery, broken watches and embroidered appliqued and sequinned patches decorate their dresses. German recycles, reuses and repurposes, she hates wasting materials, but her sustainability comes from a need to provide us with visually strong and intricate messages.
German's "power dolls" included in "Trampoline: Resilience & Black Body & Soul" (an event in association with Pavel Zoubok Fine Art) represent women running away from violent persecutors, they are abandoned children or mothers, but they are never victims.
They are symbol of past traumas and physical representations of the power of self-preservation; they are Madonnas praying for the victims and witnesses of gun violence; they represent utopian beings, goddesses set to triumph and help those who adore them. Above all, they are active odes to resilience, hybrid beings representing acts of love in response to the injustices and violence committed against Black and Brown people.
The exhibition at Fort Gansevoort also features wall-mounted altars made with objets trouvés representing carriers of joy and love set to protect the souls of Black Americans, and portraits like those of tennis icons Venus and Serena Williams integrating tennis rackets, and reminding us that we often use symbols and ojbects to represent Black women rather than considering them for the champions they are (think about all the times Serena Williams faced criticism for the outfits she donned at tennis championships, a debate that reshifted the attention of people from her skills to her style).
Power and strength are the keyword to unlock German's message that is ultimately one of love for Black Americans. As she states indeed in the exhibition press release, "I am in love with the deep survival, elastic resilience and ordinary, creative, genius of Black People. For the ways that we make ourselves bright against he slaughter of our own names – acts of ordinary, restorative, creative insistence. The insistent force of making, seeing, playing, protection – loving – whose evidence shapes the culture of a society that never visioned the Black Body into freedom, resources, or power."
Image credits for this post
All images courtesy of the artist, Fort Gansevoort and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, New York.
Vanessa German
Big Smile
2019
66.5 x 60 x 6.5 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
It's the real thing
2019
84 x 48.5 x 16 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
You Will Have to do Your Best to Fly Away From Them Hands That Come to Take You Outta Your Own Soul
2019
96 x 48 x 14.5 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
Can I Love You Without Capitalism?
How?
2019
59 x 67.5 x 26 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
Hyper Sensitive
Feeling Machine
Body.Soul.Emotion.
Volume Control
2019
55 x 30 x 17 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
Hammer Head
Rage Machine
Agony Machine
Baptism
2019
70 x 36 x 26 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
Joy Machine #3
Kick Push
Ring The Alarm
Fly
2019
54 x 94 x 22 in
Mixed-media assemblage
Vanessa German
HEAVY
(the heart and the love to carry in the body)
and, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, in reflection on Love and Responsibility; Responsible Loving.
HEAVY on Black Girls and the systemic torture of their Innocence. HEAVY. The perceived living response to a lack of, or dearth of a Innocence.
The Cost Of it.
2019
101 x 31 x 22 in
Mixed-media assemblage
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