Artist vanessa german works across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, installation, and photography. 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 the 1960s onwards to propose new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and misogynoir. As she re-appropriates, re-conceptualizes, and resiliently transforms both her materials and the symbolic weight of her images, she occasions a transfiguration analogous to healing.

Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press, co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and co-hosting its accompanying Feminist Keywords Podcast. Her research focuses on the intersections of black feminism, sexuality, and the aesthetic.