I went to see vanessa german’s work at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center, part of the 2025 exhibition In Reflection: Contemporary Art and Ourselves, after a recommendation from Jon Witzky, Program Director at ARTS Southeast and co-founder of IMPACT Magazine. There was only one of her sculptures in the show, but that was more than enough. I stood in front of it, wide-eyed, knowing I had to krak teet with the mind and spirit behind it. And did!

In this conversation, we discussed everything from dismantling hierarchy to naming (and shaming) society’s -isms, from transforming porches into portals of possibility to the extensive costs of war.

Trelani Michelle: You intentionally lowercase your name. bell hooks, for me, was the first person I encountered to do that and her reason was to shift the focus from her individual identity to her ideas. I believe the same for adrienne maree brown. I read that you did it to “level yourself without hierarchy.” What other practices or choices have helped you dismantle hierarchy in your art, your relationships, your understanding of yourself?

vanessa german: I was raised by a mother who raised us to fundamentally interface with the world through our creativity. So my experiences of existing as a human being, fundamentally, are through a space of curiosity and inspiration, and activation through inspiration, which doesn't exist in a hierarchy. What I will say is, that is fundamental human technology that's available to every being because it centers through the engine of your imagination. It is an interface of the spiritual with your physical body and that's how I was raised.

It's very confusing to then go deeper into the world and have that sort of fundamental knowing, that we are human, and that we have the opportunity, for a short period of time, to engage with connection in nature and inspiration at the most intimate level of life — in our soul, in our body, in our imagination — and then to be told no: that that is an upside-down way of thinking and living. It is our job to sort of be external characters to be made by the world and made by the systems and the structures and the histories of the world. So while I had confusion about it, fundamentally I understood, because of the way I was raised, that we're the inherent gift of being human. Being alive is just in being, that you get to be. And that belongs to everybody whether you're born with cerebral palsy, whether you're born in a castle, whether you're born in a sandpit. Everybody has access to that intimate technology of being human and it's really confusing when the world tells you that it gets to make you, as opposed to you making yourself and making your own reasons and connections.

TM: Do you mind if I name your mother?

vg: My mother's name is and was Sandra Keat German. My mother was a fiber artist, a quilter.

TM: I saw that. A quilter, a costume maker. Like whoa! What did y'all living room look like?

vg: My mother had an eye. My mother had style. She had a really international, a really global understanding of objects. So I grew up in a house with art. I grew up in a house with objects from around the world. I grew up in a house with a library. There were a ton of books, but I also grew up in a house with a maker. She had wings. She had that thing that you can't buy. You can cultivate it some, but mostly it's a part of your distinct technology.

Like, some people come with a natural ability to be an athlete. My mother's first nature was the nature of an artist. I grew up in a house that had paintings of women, sculptures of women, and interesting objects from a global perspective. We didn't grow up rich. My parents’ happy place was, like, flea markets and swap meets and garage sales. I lived in L.A. and every Saturday we would go out with The Recycler, the classified ads, and go to garage sales. So it wasn't that my parents were rich collectors or anything, but my mother had an eye. And we lived in a place that was global, so we got a bunch of stuff from flea markets and garage sales that populated our house. And my mom had some friends that were artists.

TM: I saw that you were born in Milwaukee but predominately raised in L.A. Do you know how or why y'all migrated?

vg: My father got a job offer at a place on Terminal Island in Long Beach, and then he got recruited by Toyota. So that's one thing. My father had a job offer, but my mother would never have raised us in Milwaukee.

TM: Of their five children, how many identify as artists or don't identify but you see it anyway?

vg: No, we were all raised as artists. It’s like fundamental. We went to Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES). All of us went there, and we all went to Los Angeles Conservatory for the Performing Arts. So we're all, you know, invested and have been nourished through the creative and performative arts. I live as a professional artist, but we are all makers in our daily lives. Like, there's not one of us who isn't a maker or a creator in some form.

TM: What's the difference between a maker and an artist?

vg: I feel like carpenters are makers, but a master carpenter is also an artist because they bring light into it. So light is that distinct spark of radiance, of their own spirit, their own very specific element of their vision and creativity into it. Many people can work with wood, but a master carpenter, a master woodworker, is in communication with their soul and the wood and vision, and their own source of all of those ingredients at the same time.

I think an artist is in communication with the energy of all things that is distinctly in and through their body and their being, which comes through whatever material they're working with. It’s why people like artists, why people like art and see art, because it's something beyond. It's beyond the mind. It connects you to the source of all. Even if it's just an incremental, a tiny connection, it feeds the part of you that is made of light; keeps you alive. That's the difference. Lots of people can put an IKEA shelf together.

TM: Do the materials guide you or do you kinda go in knowing what spirit you’re channeling?

vg: I work with a lot of different kinds of materials and I work with found objects. In my studio right now, I'm working with wood as the armature in the foundation sculptures, but I also have objects that I got from the flea market. There's a tote of discarded textile, old clothes, and drapes. So when I’m using an existing object and it's sort of removed from its circumstance and its history, it is a form of communication. I'm in communication and I'm in relationship with the history of that object, and there's a poetic draw from that object into the new object that is being created. So I'm using some old curtains right now in the studio and they filtered light into a home and that poetry of home and that poetry of this curtain having carried the light from the sky into the house becomes part of the power source, which is the spirit alive inside of the work. So the opportunity that I have in my lifetime is to be in connection with whatever intrigues me or inspires me, and to listen to it.

TM: Black Girl on Skateboard Going Where She's Got to Go to Do What She's Got to Do It and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever. That one, me and my 15-year-old daughter just instantly, if there's ever such thing as target audience, it was us immediately. Take me through her creation. Where were you? What was bringing you joy during that time? What were your prominent feelings during that time of your life?

vg: I might've made it in North Carolina, I don’t remember. I grew up in L.A. around skateboard culture. I went to a school that had an empty swimming pool, and if you got to school early enough with the skateboarders, you could watch them skate the pool, which was really exciting for me. There were things that the world would say Black people didn't do when I was growing up: Black kids didn’t surf. Black kids didn’t skateboard. Black kids didn't listen to opera. But all of that was coming from, from what I understand, the stupidity of the white imagination, which is really a dulled down sort of experience, of imagination.

One of the reasons why I say it's stupid is because it imagines that it can control the life force of other people. If you go through an archive of images of my work, you'll find that I've done several sculptures on skateboards. And part of that is, I'm making power figures. I'm making artwork that I recognize isn’t viewed with a power that is beyond my hands and beyond my life. It's part of what makes it art. The part of what also makes it spiritual art is the deep investment of the everlasting, ever-expanding energy of love inside of the work. That energy, that vehicle of love and power, one of the ways that I communicate the vehicleness of it is on something with wheels. Like, a sculpture will be standing on wheels, it'll be pulling wheels. The foundation of that work being on a skateboard is that it's going somewhere.

And I am often confronted with white people, specifically white men, and then also some Black people, because I think this is an issue of imagination and not necessarily understanding why you're alive as a human being, but I definitely experience white folks who want to control my movements and don't think my body belongs where it belongs, whether I'm sitting in first class on an airplane or in an opera booth at the Metropolitan Opera. There's this way that whiteness in America and whiteness in the imperialist experience is controlling where other people can move, where they can go, what they can do. And then I find, thanks to the internet and cell phones, all these videos where Black people are being questioned about what they're doing — whether it's a Black girl selling lemonade and some white women calling the police on her, whether it was the Black couple in the park taking their engagement pictures and a white woman called the city and said they don't have a permit, but it turned out they did have a permit — and this way that whiteness wants to experience its own power through policing our body.

This clapback in the sculpture is to that really diminished voice of the white imagination that wants to tell you where you can go, that says only white boys ride skateboards and surf, so it's a clapback at that, but it is also saying, I don't have to tell you what I'm doing. I don’t have to tell you where I'm going. I don't owe you an itinerary of my life or my mind or my ideas or my body. So that work also is a joyful celebration of claiming permission and agency to be about the world with your body as the beautiful instrument of life that it is — a vehicle, literally, for your soul.

So, Black Girl on Skateboard… is, if I were to give it an understanding as a power figure, it is an emancipatory figure. It emancipates the heart and the mind and the places that we have been coerced and convinced into incarcerating our own radiance. But you can't hold light in your hand. As hard as we might try to keep our light in dark places, light is only light. It's always going to be light. You can be convinced against yourself and misidentify your existence, which I think is something that this culture does intentionally. It convinces us to misidentify ourselves, to misidentify our fundamental human existence.

TM: That reminds me so much of Zora Neale Hurston saying “White folks are very stupid about some things. They can think mightily but cannot feel.” The white imagination has forced all of us into living in our heads, always thinking, instead of being in our bodies. In your 2015 TEDx Talk, “Love Front Porch,” you told a story about living in Homewood [a Pittsburgh neighborhood], working on the porch, and kids joining you. They’d ask what to do, to which you responded, this ain’t a class. “You gotta make a decision,” you’d said, “Start with a color and a purpose.” That reminded me of Octavia Butler saying we are all born with potential but that we have to choose our purpose, that a life without purpose is aimless. Do you agree with that?

vg: What I would synthesize that as is: You have the power to choose. You also then, having the power of choice, which is direction and focus and where you place the energy of your physiology (your breath, your heart, your lungs), you can choose also to change your mind. You know, one of the things that is really stolen in this experiment of the United States is power of choice as freedom. This country really does a lot of performative symbolic freedom, but the way that it's worked is that it’s always been permissible only for a few to have freedom of choice, whether it's choosing their purpose, choosing what they wanna wear, choosing to get married or not to get married.

I think that the thing about choosing your purpose is…I recognize that there's meditation inside of that. There's reflection, there's time and stillness in observing other human beings moving in others’ purpose. I think your life has purpose before you come into the body. So fundamentally, like spiritually, I believe that we choose to take a human life, and we choose to be in connection with other spirits, other souls, that we've been in connection with throughout lifetimes, and that we agree to assist one another to carry each other through whatever existence. I believe that in this lifetime, my mother was my mother, but in another lifetime, I was her mother. In another lifetime, we were sisters. In another lifetime, she was my father and I was her brother.

I believe that, like, energetics are fundamentally a stream of conscious, creative energy — a conscious, creative momentum of source — and we just keep showing up and choosing to take a human life. I think it's very challenging to take a human life, which is why we agreed to partner with one another before we're even in this body. And so I experience a purpose that is outside of my own life. It's not even just this existence as being a human being named vanessa german. Like, I experience touchpoints of my… it doesn't even feel appropriate to say “my.” I experience deep purpose before the body and before the name that I have now, that I am connected to and involved with through my lineage, through also, literally, the star system that we live in. So people can choose many purposes through their lives. I think the power and the true freedom is the emancipatory foundation to know that the choice is yours.

TM: Before the kids joined you on the porch, they stared, they came to the fence, they swung on the fence. What do you think children are craving when they're staring, when they're swinging on the fence, when they're asking to come over?

vg: I think staring is a form of ingestion. You're taking something in. Like, staring is not a catatonic state. It’s an active form of information gathering and then synthesis of information you're gathering, right? This is not adults staring each other down in a bar or staring at somebody because they hurt you. This is a child having all the sort of spokes and wheels of the memories that they have, the feelings that they’ve had, and they're staring and synthesizing the information they're taking in with things they've seen before, things they've seen on television.

Staring is a really active happening. Something’s happening. And I think what's happening is a kind of synthesis. It's, ‘I've never seen an adult in my neighborhood making stuff on their front porch. I like to make stuff. I made something at school. Do you think I could make things when I'm not at school? What if I made things on my front porch? What if that lady helped me make things on my front porch? Well, my mother’s not gonna let me make something on my front porch. I'm gonna ask that lady if I can make something on her front porch because she looks like she's having fun. Making things is fun.’ I think that's what's happening. That whole little monologue… staring is synthesis.

TM: Rachel Maddow, in 2011, visited Homewood saying it was the most dangerous neighborhood in America. You since added that not everyone and even not even the majority of folk in Homewood are the ones who make the neighborhood unsafe. That made me think of my elders reminiscing on the days when Black neighborhoods included all income levels and job titles and how everyone knew your name and your people, how that contributed to you know community care and the potential and inspiration that existed in those communities, and how the undoing of that togetherness made space for rampant crime.

You also spoke about having to leave Homewood, though, because you lived in fear too often for your own peace of mind and well-being. That made me think of like toxic relationships. Like, we have so many good times together. I see you and I know the magic that you're capable of, but, at the same time, you're killing me. How do you hold space for both the love and the grief of leaving a place that shaped you so significantly?

vg: I can look back and see that I probably should've left sooner. Hindsight is a gift that allows my heart to deepen and my being to grow wiser. I spent most of my time in Pittsburgh trying really hard. I look back and see an incredible amount of effort and not enough flow. And when things got to a place where I could have taken the opportunity to wind the art house down and change my life, I didn't know how to do that because I was really alone. Even though I was like public, I was like isolated in so many different ways.

I'm doing a public art project in Pittsburgh now and I sort of cringe. I don't feel great because I can just see all these places that, one, have been eaten by gentrification, but I also see that I was just trying really, really hard. I have an incredible amount of tenderness for the heart that I was when I was there, because I was deeply lonely and disconnected and trying desperately to be loved the way that I thought somebody like me should be loved and to be worthy and valuable and recognized. It's just like a lot of effort and fear, and it's very sad to me. It's also very sad ‘cause I don't think anybody should live around murder or gunshots or victimization for generations. It's unacceptable.

America is so proud of its Americanness, but part of its Americanness is the deep violence that it continues to perpetrate on people of color, on Black folks. The deep continued injustice, nobody actually deserves that shit. It’s hard to see that there's a willingness to change some things and a willingness to keep other narratives in place because they uphold ideas that are violent racist and white supremacist, but that's around the country. But nobody should have to watch people die in the street. That makes life really hard. It's hard to watch people die. It's hard to watch people watch people die. It’s like second, third-hand violence. It's hard to be at funerals for infants who got shot. It's hard to live in a city where there's a crisis of missing and murdered Black women and Black girls. It's hard to be in a city where nobody's had to be responsible, no police officers accountable for shooting and killing Black kids. Then there's also the lie that we shouldn't say out loud that it's hard, and that we shouldn't say out loud that it's traumatic, and you can't sleep or you don't actually dream anymore. You're just, like, firmly rooted in survival, but have mostly given up, so you spend most of your time in a state of either trying to cope through food, substances, drinking beer on the front porch. That's America.

America still tell us the story that only some people should be okay. America's quite happy with large portions of its population being underfed, undernourished, undereducated. And by undereducated I mean dismantling public education and libraries. Their America is quite okay with that because it supports a narrative that is fundamentally undermining even the people who think that they're basking in the glow of that narrative. It undermines their humanity too. But Homewood is just another place in the country where that story is playing out, and it's sad.

Maybe if you ask me about it in five years, I have something else to say about it. I'm grateful that I made so much art in Homewood. The mother of Homewood — the nurturing mother, goddess, grandmother, ancestor spirit of Homewood — held me and incubated my creativity, as she did for many other creative people, whether it was Billy Strayhorn, Dinah Washington, who had an aunt that lived there, or Ahmad Jamal. There were all these jazz greats there, all these writers, and Homewood was a creative incubator for them also. I'm one of many, but you don't see these artists retiring in Homewood. It's like a caravansary. People come and they move through and they're incubated, and that's a powerful presence and a powerful spirit, but I have to tell you, I can't unsee some of the things I’ve seen.

TM: How do you care for your own softness while doing work that demands just so much?

vg: Well, the thing about feeling things is that feeling them is its own complete cycle. I think the problem comes when you tell yourself you can't feel things. Feeling wants homeostasis in your body, so if you cry, what's the hormone that's in your tears? Is it oxytocin? So when you weep, the weeping, even though you're in pain, it actually has medicine that is soothing and connecting in your tears. Your body is a miracle of love. Certain therapists will say you're gonna have to sit with that. When you sit with a thing — whether you're sitting with silence and the thing, or you're sitting with music and the thing, or you sitting with a pad of paper in your hand with the thing, and you’re processing the thing — you are not resisting the thing.

To be in a state of resistance to feeling incapacitates the miracle of love that your physiological body is. So when I say feeling is a whole thing, is a complete cycle, it’s because feeling is always pushing through its own existence to the state where it has completed itself. The thing that's very difficult is this culture, one, tells you not to feel, and it tells you you're powerful when you can control your feelings. It tells you that you can only feel before 9 o'clock in the morning and after 5 o'clock in the evening. It says you're gonna have to be done feeling when your maternity leave is up in seven weeks.

TM: Or that you have too much to be grateful for to be feeling sad or mad.

vg: This cultural structure, because it is mind-centered, it's like you can control things with your mind. It actually undermines the system of nourishment that is fundamentally a part of your nature. Like, we are nature. We are made of carbon; we are hydrogen. Everything on this planet is made of the same thing, and nature always seeks homeostasis. We are winter, spring, summer, and fall. We are cycles, we rhythms, we are tides. We are high tide and we are low tide. We are our own heat waves. Everything that is nature, we are that.

Nature always seeks homeostasis. You will have a high tide, you will have a low tide. You will feel up, you will feel down, and then you will feel up again. So it's not for me about the softness but the fact that the technology of my being alerts me through emotion. It doesn't mean that I'm totally controlled by my emotions. I know that if I feel outraged, I really am just hurt and sort of experiencing a level of betrayal against my being, against my humanity, so I can articulate things and feelings.

But I'm seeing a lot of shit that I've never seen before. One of them was watching a mother whose son was killed by Israel in Palestine. And the woman was holding his foot. I think he was a teenager or something. She was just holding this foot and kissing it. She was like, this will be the last time I can kiss my son. I might not ever know that feeling, but there’s a way that, as an artist, for me to sit with that and feel those feelings. What I do is I go to the material. I go into my box of feet, ‘cause I have that in my studio, and I find a foot and an ankle that look like the foot and the ankle she was holding. And because it's love, I pull out my rose quartz, and I adorn the foot with rose quartz. Then I go to my box of hands, ‘cause I have a box of hands, and I find hands that are curved the way her hands are curved, and I build this thing and I sit with the fact that this woman is thanking Allah, thanking God: Oh my God, you let me say goodbye to his foot. And then I get to contend with that love and that grief and that pain and the horror.

I pay a lot of money in taxes and the majority of it has gone to the Department of Defense — not to care for people in Sudan, not to care for people in Congo, but to undermine their lives and their humanities. It's a very painful thing, but I'm in my studio as an artist and instead of doing eight lines of coke and trying to turn the feeling down, I’m able to feel through and allow the feeling to be awake and alive as it touches me as I touch and transform material.

TM: You also mentioned in that TEDx Talk that in desiring more safety and security, we often state that “they” need to do something about it, then you checked yourself by acknowledging that “there’s no ‘they,’ there’s me right here, right now in this moment.” When I think about injustices in places like Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Homewood, New Orleans, Savannah, etc., in those moments of grief and frustration, what does personal accountability look like?

vg: I turn 50 next year. I have been placed in the opportunity over the last three years to stand in the circle of abuse and victimhood from many different perspectives. I had this reading and the lady in the reading said, you know one of the things we do over the course of a lifetime is become everybody in the story. And so what that has removed from my mind and is still removing, because this is like a really calcified idea in my being, is that we can judge each other. I'm not saying that human beings who identify as white are fundamentally fucked up, but that white imagination is stupid. It's stupid because it's keeping you from your fullness. As long as you try to control me, we’re chained together. Like, you can't even dance free without swinging me around the dance floor ‘cause you trying to control what I'm doing. You could be really free and just let other people dance the dance they wanna dance, but you really concerned about what I'm doing with my body. That's stupid. It's undermining you, because you are so much more.

My dad was a Vietnam veteran. He had a stroke the year my mom died, and after he had that stroke, it opened up his veil of masculinity. He cries easier and he tells stories. My father went into the army when he was 17, he was drafted, and then he was in Vietnam by the time he was 18 or 19 years old. One of the things my dad talks openly and shares his emotions about war is how it drove the soldiers crazy. They were all very young — 18, 19, 20, 22 years old. I asked my dad this past Memorial Day, and I recorded it, I asked “Were you patriotic when you were at war? Were you like, I'm doing this for America because I understand that this fight is for freedom?” And he said “no.” He's like “nobody was.” He said you get over there and you're so scared you're gonna die that you're killing people just to stay alive. He said you also will fight to keep the person by your side alive, so you fight for your buddies. He said when people lost their buddies, they would lose their mind. And my dad was a witness to the My Lai massacre, where American soldiers murdered all the women and children in this village. And my dad was a master blaster, so he set detonations and he was in the jungle. He said him and the other Black guy who did the detonations were looking out from the jungle and they're just watching white guys, white GIs, shooting women who had already been shot 20 times. He said you’d lose your mind if your buddy got shot, because he didn't just get shot; he got blown apart. You know his head landed over here, his knees over there.

One of the things I understand is how devastating it is to ask human beings to kill each other. No matter what you did to tell them that the other people deserved it, my father let me know that your humanity lets you know that you don't have the right to do it, and you're only doing it to save your own tail and to keep your own self alive. But the cost of it is enduring. It doesn't leave you. Healing from that PTSD isn't really what you want to do with the rest of your life, trying to contend with what you did when you were 18, 19, 20, 22 years old — when grown ass men were telling you to shoot innocent civilians while they were standing in line for some lentils. You're gonna have to try to forget that for the rest of your life and you're not gonna be able to.

So I am aware of the damage that is being done on all these sides, right? I'm not just saying fuck Zionists. I'm looking at it and being like, damn why would you do that to your people? Why would you ask your people to cross the line of their own humanity? The cost of it, you're gonna reap the horror of this for generations in your own household. When I say generations, one of the books I read this year was the research that has been done about Vietnam vets and exposure to mustard gas and napalm, and generationally how it has caused birth defects and medical illness and autism through the generational line. For example, my dad was in a stream trying to wash off in Vietnam and one of his buddies said “get out of there, get out of there.” And he said his whole body started to sting. There was napalm in there. So when you think you can napalm in the jungle and it's only gonna go on the Viet Cong… no. It gets on everybody.

Chemical weapons move with the wind. They flow in the water. And so my dad came back from Vietnam with this horrible experience. That one time he was in a stream and his whole body started to sting and he got out, well, the research I read this year said that napalm caused diabetes. It caused insulin resistance in a whole generation of young GIs. And the birth defect from the father to the line of children were autoimmune diseases, and then from the line of those children with autoimmune diseases, they're giving birth to children, and so you're looking at 1980s and ‘90s births of children with autism. My father came back with diabetes; my sister, the firstborn, has multiple sclerosis; her firstborn has autism. We grew up thinking this is just our family. But that's the generational impact that is falling through the gene code of people who were damaged by mustard gas, napalm, and the chemical weapons used in Vietnam.

You gotta remember Vietnam was the draft and certain people paid to get out of the draft, like Donald Trump. So it was also a class war on people, right? It's so damaging to think that war will ever bring justice and then to act out a war. If they turn Palestine into a resort town for Israel, nobody's gonna be able to sleep in those beds. The spirit of the land will revolt and rebel for thousands of years. And the damage of that will be lived with —

TM: — For the rest of humanity. I learned from the book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that the Anishinaabe Nation has a mythical creature called the Wendigo. It’s a spirit of greed that lusts for more and more control. It lives in all of us, so it has to be checked. Our society is being led by the Wendigo right now. It’s also cannibalistic, so when you talked about how harming others is also harming ourselves, it made it think of that. It also made me think of Tupac and his THUG LIFE tattoo, which he said stands for “The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.”

I wanna pivot real quick and go back to Homewood. One of the little boys on the porch wanted to paint the night sky, but he was afraid to add birds because he didn't trust that he could execute it well enough to not ruin the entire thing. You told him, “You have to try it. You have to trust yourself.” When's the last time that you had to nudge yourself to trust yourself enough to try?

vg: Covid stacked a whole bunch of shows up in my calendar, so I had to work really hard and really fast. Part of the thing about trying new things, and moving in a new direction, and experimenting in play is sort of space to do that. So, like, I'm in a residency in Bedstuy right now and sort of playing with things, but I am not as afraid to try things. I think one of the things that I would experience in the art house is that a lot of kids thought that art supplies were scarce. I was like, “No, you can make multiple paintings. Like, you can try several different ways to do the thing,” you know what I mean? And so I try a lot of things.

TM: What do you wish your people, however you define your people, would trust themselves to try?

vg: To make a life of your own architecture. You can live how you wanna live. If you feel like you wanna live in a Manhattan high-rise 50 feet off the ground, you can do that. You can also live on the land. You don't have to work 9 to 5. You could raise enough food for you and somebody you love. Like, you can make a life of your own design and desire. You can learn the skills that it takes to do that and you can do it at the level that you are right now. I feel like the future is sovereign. In the future, people will have sovereign lives and what they'll work for is sovereignty.

TM: How does community care exist in your life these days?

vg: I think I'm pretty weird and got like totally isolated working really hard, really fast for a few years, so I still have a pretty isolated life and I also have like object impermanence and people impermanence, so I don't experience a lot of deep community. I don't have that a lot in my life and in a way that I would like to, which is actually more person-to-person and, like, sharing meals with people and laughing, talking to people, having people visit my studio. That’s not something that I have in my life right now. I'm pretty socially awkward also. I'm a very intense person and I start conversations in ways that I think can be, you know, —

TM: — A lot for some people.

vg: More than casual. Yeah, it can be a lot. But there are some people that I feel lucky enough to call my friends, and they have a global existence. I have a global existence. Check on people when you're in their cities, but I'm not flush with community care at all. I've also been a giver, so I've also been the person for decades who's been giving in a care system to other people. The therapist told me that I have to make space to receive. So, no, I don't really have a circle of nourishing substantial community care.

TM: I look forward to you getting that in the way that you want it and you see it for yourself and your spirit needs it. I'm gonna be out one day and it's gonna be, like, three yellow butterflies land in front of me, and that’ll be my sign that vanessa is getting the community care she deserves.

vg: Thank you.

TM: What else should the people know? Anything you’re working on or have coming up?

vg: I have a big public art project I created. There’s a new recreation center in East Flatbush called the Shirley Chisholm recreation center and I'm the artist for that and we turned the entire recreation center into something called the East Flatbush People's Museum of Love and Wonder. That will open in the fall. When it comes out, there's an opportunity for people to actually see or experience work right then.

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