The following was published in Forbes magazine on July 12, 2024.

By Chad Scott

vanessa german knows how it sounds. Her metaphysical manner of speaking. Talking about magic. She feels eyes rolling.

“One of the things that people would say to me is they're not going to take you seriously; Black artists can't talk this way,” german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI), who spells her name in all lowercase letters, told Forbes.com. “They can't talk about love and their spirit because quote-unquote, they–the all-present, all-powerful ‘they’–will not take me seriously.”

When german discusses her artmaking, she’s as likely to mention “local reality”–a tenant of quantum physics until it was disproven, a mind-bending breakthrough earning the 2022 Nobel Prize–or the “double slit experiment”–another one of the most perplexing contradictions of quantum physics–as she is her materials.

Appreciating the creativity of an artist with a mind open to possibilities most never consider, or even recognize as possibilities, requires an open mind itself. Understanding something of german helps viewers get there.

“I had a profound lifesaving experience through art and creativity because there was one point in my life that I had decided to no longer go on with the body and with the breath, and the thing that saved me from destroying my own self was what would happen to me when I would be consumed by the creative process in my studio,” german said. “I didn't have any income, I was technically starving, to keep my hands from sawing into my own wrists, I kept my hands really busy, walking through the hood–there’s a lot of vacant houses and vacant lots–and I would pick up materials and I would just stack wood or I would lay out nails that I found, I would just keep my hands doing things, and at the end of that time, six months had passed because that's the amount of time I gave myself to try to save my own life, I realized that something was happening to me in the process.”

“At the time, I was like, ‘something is happening to me.’ I am more well than I have ever been and I'm not going to a doctor. I am clearer, I'm stronger. Through this process, I now can sustain my life,” she continued. “I started to wonder what was happening to me and where it took me was into exploration of what we would call esoteric wisdom and esoteric knowledge. Things were quite mysteriously falling into place in a way that was answering my questions, like what happened to me? Why didn’t I die? Why didn’t I end this? What pulled me towards this path of picking these things up? It's not that I chose, I think my life chose me.”

That was some 20 years ago now. Since then, german has produced one of the most singular multi-media creative practices in contemporary art. Her artmaking has received the nation’s most prestigious awards, and her work can be found in the permanent collections at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to name a few.

german’s journey has now taken her to the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry where a residency begun in January along with teaching a course–“Paraäcademia—Art, Spirituality, and Social Healing”–culminates with an exhibition on view at the Logan Center for the Arts July 19 through December 15, 2024.

In collaboration with her students and the local community, german has produced a new body of work including a monumental, 5-foot rose quartz head, more of her iconic “power figures,” a sound piece, a “super-sized ‘Master Blaster’ ‘boom box’ made out of lapis, sapphire and pyrite, and a four-sided pyramid unlike anything she’s ever produced before, or even thought of producing before.

The idea came to her from a most unusual studio visit.

Sun Ra (1914–1993) was a jazz musician. His music was experimental. He believed he came from and traveled through space. He was fascinated by Egyptian mythology. He was so avant-garde for his time, the avant-garde of today–three decades after his death–still isn’t within shouting distance of him.

In the 40s and 50s, he lived and played in Chicago.

During german’s residency, she attended a book event for Afrofuturist author Ytasha L. Womack. In Womack’s 2019 book, “A Spaceship in Bronzeville”–Bronzeville being one of Chicago’s historically African American neighborhoods–Sun Ra is mentioned. Prior to this, german knew nothing of Sun Ra other than that he was a musician.

“One of the things that really stood out to me is that people talked about Sun Ra the way I sometimes hear people talk about me,” german remembers. “’Oh, there's this weird, out there, fringy artist who thinks that love is powerful and thinks that they're this, and they're that,’ and they were talking about Son Ra. He said he was from outer space, and I was like, ‘Well, what if he was? Why do you talk about him like he was just a crazy man? What if he's telling you the truth?’ Is there space for that to be taken seriously, because I take that seriously?”

Back in her Chicago studio, german couldn’t shake a feeling that she needed to make a pyramid. No part of her human, figurative, spirit-based artmaking has ever been architectural or geometrical.

“This idea wouldn’t leave me alone, so I was like, okay, I'm going make a pyramid,” she said. “I didn't know the angles to cut for a four-sided pyramid, the height of the middle of the pyramid… so I'm trying to do this research to figure out how to make a pyramid.”

In early June, german’s production manager fixed german’s cuts and put the pyramid together.

“We're in the studio and a Sun Ra song came on his Spotify, which has never happened before,” german said. “(My production manager) goes, ‘Oh, look, it’s Sun Ra,’ and I said, ‘Oh, that's really weird.’ I looked at the screen and it was a song called ‘Tapestry for an Asteroid.’”

Back at her hotel room, she wanted to hear the song again and went to YouTube where Sun Ra’s “Tapestry for an Asteroid” was on the screen.

“I was like, ‘that's just wild!’ There was a number of recordings–some live performances–and so I picked this one–I just picked it–and it's Sun Ra and his band in this room and they're playing music and Sun Ra with those very intense eyes is sitting at a piano, and he's playing the keyboard and he pulls a four-sided pyramid out from underneath his seat and puts it on his head,” german said. “I looked at that and I was like, ‘Oh, damn, Sun Ra has been visiting me in the studio!’ That insistent internal pressure for me to make something that I would never … it took so much to figure out how to make a friggin’ four-sided pyramid, and not only that, but I knew the pyramid was supposed to be gold.”

Just like the mirrored, gold, four-sided pyramid Sun Ra took from underneath his chair and put on his head in the video.

The great thing about open-minded people being that with their minds open, sometimes unexpected, unexplained things–or people–come in.

In another nod to Sun Ra, german will be performing street corner meditations in Washington Park near where Sun Ra lived in Chicago and a block from the Logan Center for the Arts on her exhibition’s opening day, July 19. She invites the public to participate.