American Folk Art Museum To Honor Vanessa German

Vanessa German will receive the Audrey B. Heckler Visionary Award. Established in 2008, the award honors an individual, institution, or project that has made a unique and distinctive contribution to the field of self-taught and vernacular art. 

German is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. Establishing her own self-taught approach and distinctive artistic language, German's influential practice employs mineral crystals, beads, glass, found objects, and other sourced material to create expressive figurative sculptures that resound through the physical and metaphysical worlds. Her unique sculptural vocabulary transmits healing energy, affirming the power of love as an infinite human technology.

Considered inextricable from her identity as an activist, German’s autodidactic artmaking has its lineage in indigenous and West African folk practices as well as Black Arts movements from 1960s onwards. Working primarily with assemblage, German sculpts wood and plaster which she then adorns with a vast range of materials—some found in her community, others sourced from across the country—including prayer beads, doll parts, handmade patterned quilts, skateboards, rope, silk flowers, cowrie shells, coke bottles, vintage porcelain bells, and astroturf. These “ingredients”, as German refers to them, form just one part of each work’s medium, and are listed alongside the metaphysical components that the artist sees as indivisible from the physical objects. Such juxtapositions create complex metaphorical meanings, where the resulting cacophony of language, texture, and image is freighted with both the emotional and the physical; the spiritual and the material. In German’s words, “the objects become both the wound and the medicine.”

German has received numerous accolades over the course of her career, including the Joyce Foundation Fellowship (2024), Heinz Award for the Arts (2022), Don Tyson Prize from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018), United States Artist Grant (2018), Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2015).

More information visit https://folkartmuseum.org/