In Conversation: vanessa german & The Colored Girls Museum

german is a leading citizen artist working in sculpture, performance, and communal ritual to cultivate spiritual models for transforming human experience. 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. Photo by Charlie Rubin

Dubois is a social practice artist, creative scholar, and institution-builder who earned her BA at Wesleyan University. In 2015, she founded the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, a grassroots “place-based” living museum that honors and memorializes the experiences of women and girls of the African diaspora. Today, the museum is home base for an ever-widening circle of artists and scholars who create projects that center community. Photo by Zamani Feelings

Toomer is a writer, muse, and community organizer born and raised in New York. She is a Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow and a recipient of the Joel Gay Creative Writing Fellowship, appointed by Roxane Gay. Toomer is the cofounder of the Josie Club, a social club dedicated to celebrating queer Black womxnhood, and a board member of the Free Black Women’s Library. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and writes the weekly Substack column “Tiny Violences.”