vanessa german on listening as artistic practice, the power of collective making, and the freedom to imagine otherwise.
21 August 2026
Inspired by the lives of girls whose stories were nearly erased from history, vanessa german’s’…do you remember when you were the sky?’ asks what art can recover when the archive is incomplete. In this interview, the artist explores the role of intuition, collaboration, and spiritual practice in creating works that honour the past while imagining more expansive futures.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: The title ...do you remember when you were the sky? feels personal and expansive. Where did it come from, and what kind of remembering are you inviting viewers into?
vanessa german: This came to me in a vision, and we accept that everything in the practise of making art is connected to everything else. Everything in the world is connected to everything else. Everything in the universe is connected and is speaking to one another.
So a couple of years ago, I woke up in the morning and heard the phrase: do you remember? No, I heard the phrase, you all come from where the sky comes from. And that was for me a reckoning that involved justice. If we all come from where the sky comes from, we all have the breadth of the sky. We all have the possibilities of the sky. And any action against that is an injustice and is a crime against the spirit.
So, when I was making this show, I was having a really tough time moving through the figures and listening very closely to what the girls wanted, how they wanted to move through the space. What they wanted to look like. I was on the red piece, and it hadn’t become red at that point, but it had started out red, and I didn’t think it was supposed to be red. I was having all this trouble between the conceptual, the visionary, the reality of the work, and how I work. So one night, when I was in bed, I thought about how these girls were probably in bed together, and how the youngest among them said, “Do you remember when you were the sky?” And that was a revelation to the other girl.
When I say I thought it, it was not in my head. It was in my spirit. It was in my breath. If a girl is incarcerated, if she is kept silent, if she is kept away from her liberty, all she can do is imagine it, hearken back to it, point it and call it forward for herself. I imagine that is what the youngest girl did and that it was an awakening.
This exhibition brings together sculpture, performance, community engagement, and spiritual reflection. How do these parts of your practice come together in this project?
I said earlier that everything and everyone is connected. The connections might be right next to each other, like a conversation.
They might be alive and show up as multiple voices inside of you. Everything is connected. Nature, the rock and the river, and the sun and the stars and the moon. Everything has an impact on everything else. So, this way of working through community engagement and spiritual practise, conceptually and historically, is just the practise of listening to what is. It is what the girls would have been turning around in their heads. You access that through just giving permission; it is allowing for the voices to be in connection, to be moved, to be inspired, to ask the question of a large group of people. What is the love telling us? You know, whatever it is. But every part of it is speaking to the next part. And simultaneously, they are in conversation with each other. This is the same practise of listening.
The exhibition grew out of your research into the story of the girls who escaped from the Colored Girls’ Dormitory in 1913. How do you balance historical fact and imagination when working with overlooked or forgotten stories?
Only so much of the girls’ stories was available. Not all the girls’ names were recorded. I was lucky enough to work with the historian. She gave a lot of information and provided us with more about the hospital where the girl who fell was taken. The reality is that anything that has happened is available to be touched, whether or not it has been recorded as historical fact. That isn’t magic, but it is through the spirit, spiritually activated items, and spiritually activating the text.
So, when a story is incomplete, there’s a way you have to submerge yourself. I submerged myself in as many details of the girl’s story as I could. And then I filled it in with my imagination. I imagined being a little black girl, suffocating. I imagined being a little black girl, knowing that it would be better for me to go out of a window. And the things that come up in that, those get to be the historical facts for the case that I am making. That’s what I do.
Many of the works include contributions from people you met in Louisville. How does collaboration shape your ideas of authorship and ownership?
There’s a way that the work isn’t mine, that it just comes through me. And in that way, it doesn’t have to live forever. It doesn’t have to be only one thing. We think about art as this exhibition, this thing that we made, that I made. But I don’t know that’s the case. I feel like maybe it’s more important that the work comes to be to trigger the work that comes next.
I think right now about what other people gave besides their body, and their hope, and their words, and their pain, and their hope and grace. That came through the nights of the performance, when we performed a ritual ceremony and talked about who had lived an unexpressed life. You have? Would you like to make some marks to express that or express yourself?
I then took those marks, and I made them into wall works. And that way, the work contains the energy of each other. It goes to the place where that energy can go and wants to go. That’s the way I think about that.
Your sculptures bring together materials from cowrie shells and crystals to quilts and found objects. What draws you to these materials, and what role do they play in the stories your works tell?
The work contains all the objects you mentioned and more. I don’t experience objects as inanimate. They’re animate, and they’re doing something. They have a time and a place to do something, and they must do it in the work. That’s how I see everything – a cog in a machine, as objects in an assembly line. They must all be present to make the work, and everything individually has its own known world use; its own known world purpose, and then outside of the known world at the fringes, at the edges of our known reality, there’s a way that I’m giving definition to the work; I’m giving definition to the objects, so that they can add that power to the work.
Listening seems to have been important in this project, whether to people, places, or histories. What can listening make possible that other forms of research cannot?
Listening seems to be important. I think listening is often underrated in our practise, because sometimes there’s a lot of attention put on an artist’s conceptual prowess, and pulling something from an unknown place, an unnamed place, or an unlocated place may seem weird; it’s unseeable. To work in the known and to work with prowess in the known is really a muscle. It’s mighty in some ways.
The kind of listening that I am doing requires me to listen with the secret senses. Those senses that cause the hairs on the back of your neck to stand up, and they move you through the world. Oftentimes, we call that intuition. Intuition functions in many dimensions. I’m trying to pull as much clarity into the voices that my intuition is serving for me to hear, touch, and hold. This is the kind of listening that I’m doing. So there’s a dimension of listening that is for objects, and there’s a dimension of listening that’s to people, and there’s a dimension of listening that’s so subtle that you are called to listen and to know, because listening doesn’t always give you an answer, so you have to give it an answer.
The figures in the exhibition appear to leap, fall, and fly through the gallery. What does movement allow you to express about freedom, courage, or transformation?
What does movement allow you to express? Movement in this is just the way these sculptures talked to me. This is the way they wanted to be seen and to be held. They wanted to be shown as free and climbing the walls of their imagination. When I look at all of them in motion, I think about them pointing the way to the doors, to the window to escape, but also playfully bounding through the universe. That’s a level of freedom that is unheard of: they’re so free, they’re bouncing through dimensions, they’re bouncing through this reality. They have that power, and they’re joyful. That was where I started in one place, just pointing the way, and then, in another way, I was able to set them free, as totally free as they could be. I can’t even imagine what that was.
Your work often brings together memory, healing, and resistance. What conversations or reflections do you hope visitors will leave with after experiencing this exhibition?
Well, I hope that people think about the vastness of the possibility of their life, and how they, in turn, commit a grave injustice by holding someone else to the confines of their own imagination. To be free is the gift that we have. But there are limitations placed on it, both inside and outside ourselves. So I would say: listen to your intuition, be guided by your soul, and exuberantly experience your life.
This exhibition was on view at the Chellgren Gallery at the Speed Art Museum from 10 April until 9 August 2026.
