Vanessa German reimagines histories of escape, community, and becoming at the Speed Art Museum.
9 April 2026
Opening at the Speed Art Museum, ‘…do you remember when you were the sky?’ marks a profound return for the Pittsburgh-based artist, inaugurating the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program with a body of work shaped by deep community engagement in Louisville. The exhibition unfolds as both culmination and continuation, rooted in months of research, dialogue, and collective making.
German’s practice, grounded in assemblage, transforms an expansive array of materials, from rope and mineral crystals to quilts, skateboards, and cowrie shells, into sculptural figures that pulse with motion and presence. These hybrid forms, at once fragile and defiant, evoke young girls in states of flight, fall, and transformation, composing a charged installation that oscillates between dream and nightmare.
Central to the exhibition is a reimagining of the largely obscured history of the Colored Girls Dormitory in Louisville, where acts of escape and self-determination resonate across time. German’s earlier performance series, Future Histories of Emancipation, informs this presentation by embedding local narratives within a broader spiritual inquiry into freedom, memory, and becoming.
Here, sculpture becomes a living archive, one shaped not only by the artist but by the community itself, insisting on art as a site of shared authorship and radical possibility.
This exhibition will be on view at the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky from 10 April until 28 June 2026.
