On one of the first days of spring warm enough to sit outside without a coat, vanessa german (previously) and I met at her studio just outside of Chicago. I had planned to discuss her work and the Gray Center fellowship that brought her to the city to teach students at the University of Chicago and later this summer, open a large-scale solo exhibition on its campus. But as we sat in folding chairs in the morning sun, the conversation veered from my list of questions to topics vital and vulnerable, what might be referred to as the heart of the matter.

This feels fitting considering german frequently returns to love and honesty as the core of her work and therefore, her life. She believes love is an “infinite human technology” with the immense potential to catalyze change and mobilize people, and it emerges in her work not as a theme or metaphor but as a material, named alongside others like rose quartz, Astroturf, and the artist’s own hair.

As she explains in our conversation, german is allergic to pretense and compartmentalizing. Instead, she makes work in the manner she lives her life, with an immense passion for curiosity and care and a deep understanding of what it means to be whole.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All images © vanessa german, courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York, shared with permission. 

Shown above is “Master Blaster Or, boombox from the 5th dimension,” lapis, pyrite, the sound of love as found in the frequencies of the mineral world, time before time was even time, sapphire, sodalite, sea jasper, the blues, 800 million tears and counting, a miracle, sun-Ră’s golden hand rising up the back to carry the night of sounds on his infinite and eternal shoulders, love and grief with no space between them, something awestruck and hopeful then, wood, blue pigment, gold glass beads, the earth, the stars, the sun and the moon, water, the outrageous mouth of the human heart, the beginning and the end switching places all the time, the glory of music, being awake and alive. 

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Grace Ebert: I’d like to start with being a citizen artist. What did that mean to you when you first started referring to yourself as a citizen artist, and what does it mean today?

vanessa german: I chose citizen artist because I recognize that I experienced this great disparity throughout my entire life. There’s a way that people talk about being human and what’s valuable about being human and then there’s this lived reality. As a kid, it was very confusing that adults always seemed tense, stressed,  bitter, and angry. There was this acceptance that this is what life is. This is what it is to work and to make a life. I was confused by that. I wanted to find a way to be whole in my life and not have these compartmentalized realities, where I would have to cut off part of my life just to make it.

I call myself a citizen artist because that was my decision to center my citizenship and humanity. It’s not necessarily an affiliation to a nation or a constitution. To be a citizen is to be an inhabitant of a place. The center of my inhabitation on this planet as a human is art. And since that’s the center of my existence, then I can channel everything through creativity, imagination, and curiosity. That means that human relationships are really valuable to me. Consciousness is really valuable to me, how you have chemistry with people and can feel someone else’s feelings. It’s mesmerizing to think about care, like when you care for someone and what that is. I can explore all those things through my citizenship, the citizenship of my own humanity.

I also got a really quick and intense education on what it is to be in the nonprofit industrial complex as an artist and this idea that I would be working as a teaching artist or doing poetry for nonprofit organizations with strategic missions about justice. But for them to exist, there had to be injustice. There was never a real impetus in organizations to make themselves obsolete. There were a lot of miserable people experiencing the thresholds of poverty working for organizations that were about art, justice, and community. If people aren’t well, how do they grow a well garden? I dipped out of that way of making income and decided that if I just share wherever I am, then that would meet the needs of my soul.

I understand it a different way, like how chefs feel when they think about the ingredients for food. They’re very thoughtful, and they don’t just put anything into the food. There’s this way that chefs look when they watch people eat their food. I get that. I think it’s a sharing that is not ever wrong to call love because it’s from all the dimensions of you. It’s part of your intellectual process.

But there’s also something that’s just part of your intuitive magic as a human being that you’re like, these flavors would be good together. I work in assemblage, and I’m like, this radio from 1917 is exactly the technology I need to communicate this idea with rose quartz or something. So it is this way of being as a citizen. My commitment is to love. My commitment is to the force that keeps me alive.

Grace: You mention chefs and how they’re considering each ingredient. They’re also helping to nourish someone, helping to fill their stomachs, and satisfy a very human need, which is a type of care. And in thinking about care, I’m also curious how you think about responsibility. Do you feel like you have a responsibility to yourself with the work? Do you feel like you have a responsibility to other people? Do you feel like there’s a responsibility for something?

vanessa: My first responsibility is to not do things that feel wrong. It’s not even about rightness but about recognizing dimensionally in the body and the mind that there’s a line. The first responsibility is to not cross that line, to not lie. There’s a responsibility to truth, and I think there’s intuitive truth.

The human world is really complicated. There are layers of the ways humans make up places of responsibility, right? But we share those and grow new ones. If you think about how people thought about responsibility in the Antebellum South, we’re not there anymore. There’s this article out today about how Thomas Jefferson used the flesh of Indigenous people as the reins of his horse. And so my question about responsibility is, did he cross a line himself? Did he feel like human beings shouldn’t be saddles and bridles and reins, but this is what we do? Was there no line because they didn’t recognize Indigenous people as humans? They were like cats and dogs and creatures, you know?

We know from Thomas Jefferson’s writings that he was deeply conflicted, but he used human flesh as the reins of his horses, and he had a lot of horses. So there’s a way that I experience a responsibility to a place of consciousness and awareness and not crossing that. The most pain I’ve been in is to cross that. Sometimes, I crossed it because people around me said, this is what you do. This is what Black girls do, or this is what this thing is. I feel like having a sense of responsibility to your connection to your actual consciousness and to your heart transcends the kinds of responsibility we say humans have.

I believe what Malcolm X said is true: it’s your responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Do not give yourself over to this injustice because they say it’s right. If you know it’s wrong to turn human beings into horse saddles, maybe you go the other way. That’s a kind of transcendent responsibility. I try to pay attention to that.

I think that when people in this form of civilization, ask Black people and people of color and people whose bodies, hearts, and souls have been used, abused, and taken away from themselves—when you asked me about responsibility—it’s really coded and it’s really weighted, right? I’m present on land that was stolen. I’m a direct descendant of enslaved Africans. I was never imagined until the mid-70s to be able to have freedom and resources. My first responsibility given that story would be to my own freedom and sense of liberty. When one stands in the responsibility of their own liberty, which is the soul’s right to breathe in their own freedom, then they make more freedom and liberty for other human beings.

It’s a problem when you’re in a society where true freedom and liberty are considered dangerous to the structure serving you a very particular platter of freedom and liberty. I have a responsibility to be deeply irresponsible. I’m watching police officers wake up in the morning and bop the fuck out of kids. Drag them, beat them with batons. Do you know how hard it is to actually hit another human being when you’re an adult? When you’re a kid, you hit. But have you had to hit anybody as an adult? No. It’s different. I’m watching it happen all the time. My responsibility is to be irresponsible.

I have a responsibility to be deeply irresponsible.

vanessa german

Grace: Thank you. Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking about campus protests in relation to this idea of responsibility and the conversations about the right to protest.

vanessa: When you look at the charter of those schools, it’s indefensible. This is not going to end well. I don’t know when kids are gonna start dying. I don’t know if it’s gonna be tomorrow. They’re gonna start killing these people. Why is it so easy for them to call the riot squads? How’s it so easy for these people to hit other people? I know they’re trained to actually see the citizenry as enemies. I couldn’t do that.

Grace: My first job out of college was working for the Wisconsin branch of the USA TODAY Network, which really hardened me. I’m still learning to let my wall come down and to open up to let myself feel the weight of what’s happening in the world. But you seem to be fully feeling everything. What keeps you going and allows you to not be paralyzed so you’re able to make your work?

vanessa: Well, people can only take so much. It’s new in human history that we have this much information and images of so many different things. But it struck me when you said now I can open up and feel things. I find it hard to digest. You’re not meant to hold that alone. You’re meant to sit in a circle with others, right? One of the things about feeling things is the isolation that can come to you when you don’t have a place to express the feeling.

We could say, Grace, 1,000 other young people in a 12-mile radius around you are feeling isolated and close to despair. You should start a coffee talk circle, name it, and say it’s about sorrow, grief, processing, stories, and creativity. Make a space for whatever comes from it. We’re not meant to be alone.

The people who studied capitalism said this will drive your people to isolation. They said that in this stage, people will become isolated and despondent. They will lean toward vice and violence. This is not a surprise. The way to be irresponsible and deeply loving is to say, I reject this isolation, and I will reach out to other people. Isolation frenzy gets you to turn down your feelings. You stop feeling as much. You can be irresponsible to that process of deadening within yourself by being a little bit courageous.

I think about the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in science last year for the discovery that there is no local reality, which means that unless your attention and perspective are on it, the particle actually doesn’t exist. It’s freaky. One scientist said, given this, what we can say is real is feeling. People need to trust their instincts.

When it comes to your creativity, the inclination to repeat yourself where you’ve had success before can be strong. When I did this series with rose quartz, my gallery was like, how are we going to talk to people about this new material?  And I was like, is it a new material? There’s an awareness for us creative people when the material calls us. I think about Mary Oliver who said when she would be out in the field, a poem would come to her, and she would have to write. That’s the thing, being connected to magic.

I’ve been in extreme situations where it has been very difficult to feel, but because I am focusing on people’s hearts, feelings, eye contact, resonance, and this place of not trying to tell myself lies, then I’m not hiding from how I feel. When I’m very confused, I will say help me. I have to tell my assistant sometimes, oh, I just got really, really scared. I’m about to cry. And he’ll be like, is there anything I can do? I say no. I just want you to know that nothing feels okay right now. I’ll be able to say that, so I’m not performing my existence. That makes processing less difficult because I’m not resisting. I am not accumulating suffering in trying to resist suffering. But I wish I had community.

Grace: You don’t feel like you have a community?

vanessa: I feel pretty isolated. I am. It’s not a lie. I really don’t have a community around me.

Grace: Is that partially because you’re in Chicago right now, where you don’t live, and are traveling for projects?

vanessa: Partially it is that. I have projects in different places around the country. I’m in a different city sometimes every week. When I was doing the course [at the University of Chicago], I would spend the week in Chicago, and then the next week would be in Topeka. I don’t feel like I have a local community, but I do feel like I’m part of a global community of awareness. Sometimes, I just wish there were people, somebody I could talk to. I work really hard, and sometimes after working hard, it’s 11 at night, and I want somebody to talk to.

Grace: It’s interesting to me that you feel that way because your work is so much about community and holding space for others’ feelings. For your Power Figures, you often reach out to people on social media who share their grief and heartbreak but don’t seem to have any other outlet.

vanessa: I’ve done that at different times. I invite people to bring whatever their need or heart is. I did this piece at the National Mall, and I got 1,000 wishes. Some people wrote me a chapter, and I was like, they needed to do that, you know? I’ve done that a lot of different times.

It’s very special. I take it very seriously. I thought, how do I share with people the care I give this? I took all those wishes, and I read everybody’s story. What I transcribed onto the cloth was the wish answered. One woman wrote that her child was autistic, and he was going to college, and she was worried that nobody would like him. I thought it was an honest wish. She was like, I just want Dylan to have friends. She probably can’t say that to him. What I wrote for her was, when your son walks into the room, people smile. They wave to him, and they call him over to their table. They have jokes in common. He finds his people.

I would read everything in such a way that I would make a vision in my mind’s eye until it felt like joy. I transcribed in Washington D.C. at a hotel off of K Street, right around the corner from the White House. I did 1,000 of these, and time went by. It felt like the moment where the trampoline pushes you back up, and you’re almost weightless but for hours because I committed to seeing the vision through to a place of joy. I took it really seriously. Some of these prayers are intimate, and I would answer for the person being able to have strength of heart.

After a couple of months, people would write me and say, my wish came true. It was incredibly, incredibly sweet. It was so amazing. I’ll tell you one story specifically. This Indigenous council member in Canada was part of that coalition of people who wanted the government to go through the dump to look through bodies, and that’s what they wished for. A month later, they sent me the headline in the newspaper. They were like, my wish came true. And I was like, you worked really hard for that! But it was cool to see that spooling out over a couple of months. It must feel good to be able to go to somebody and say, my wish came true. You know what I mean? To be 50 or 60 years old and have this moment that like, I wished for daffodils, and look there are daffodils!

Grace: That’s really special. You’re giving people hope that there’s a possibility for change.

vanessa: Yeah, I was strategic. In the prompt, I said send me a wish or a prayer to the highest and best good for yourself or your community. It makes people imagine what is for the highest and best good. I think about the human technology of imagination, of that being activated in mass.

Grace: Can you tell me about what you’re working on here in Chicago?

vanessa: I’m building work now. I’m making sculptures. I don’t want you to see what I’m making. It’s epic. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. I found it joyful to take this risk. I’m doing something I never did before.

Grace: How have you been sourcing your materials here? Are you still going out and finding things?

vanessa: I’m doing some very specific works. I had to specialty source some stuff because of the scale that I’m working at.

Grace: Because scale is the last forefront, right?

vanessa: Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, no actually. Consciousness is. I feel like that’s the wilderness. Love is the wilderness.

What’s that law where they say your perspective is in relationship to your consciousness? As your consciousness expands, your awareness will expand, and you will see things you didn’t see before. When 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. What is it to heal generational human trauma? What we’re understanding is the speed of human perception.

Grace: So if we expand our perception…

vanessa: That’s actually the question. You asked the question of the future. You said, what if we expand our perception? And then you would have to say how do we do that?

german’s exhibition, CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love and Reckoning, at Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, is on view through the end of 2024. 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 opens on July 19 and runs through December 15 at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago.