touchingfeeling

by Rhya Marlene Moffitt

“Saturday, July 20, 2024
All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.”
—Lauren Oya Olamina²



Friday, July 19, 2024

At the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body.

Take this bridge to get to the next _______, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we

are all dj's.

—vanessa german, exhibition title

vanessa german's first solo museum exhibition in Chicago opened at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts the day before Lauren Oya Olamina's opening entry in Earthseed: The Books of the Living in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993). Although german's exhibition and Butler's Parable were created years and states apart, I think with german and Butler as prophets on the same timeline. To speak of prophecy—clear seeing, feeling, knowing—is to speak of a future condition, that which has yet to come and is destined to arrive. Yet german and Butler shift the temporality of prophesying—they speak to a here and now that reminds us of the interconnection of all beings, time, and space.

german's installation was born out of a class titled “Paraäcademia: Art, Spirituality, and Social Healing,” which she co-taught this year while the inaugural Joyce Foundation Fellow at the University of Chicago's Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. The nine-week course, in actuality, extended over six months as the education included the physical time in the classroom and an “integrati[on]” period that culminated in the students' experience of the works german created from it.³ The course sought to be a medicine that wonders at the possibility of loving students responsibly by creating in a space free of uncaring criticism.

She flew into Chicago each week, (meta)physically closing the space between her studio and classroom. The site-specificity of german's work is a cornerstone of its creation, and this exhibition, reflective of her time in the city, invoked a third prophet from the onset as she situated herself within an alternate, simultaneous timeline to Sun Ra through an opening performance at the Fountain of Time (1920)—an outdoor sculpture by Lorado Taft on the South Side of Chicago where Sun Ra was known for preaching.

vanessa approaches the gathering dressed in white—shimmering fabric adorns a hoop skirt, flowers affixed at her crown and around her sleeves—as a character in a story that she has created for today: “The Queen of Safety Pins.” As she saunters my way, I stumble to clear the path for her, but she glides over to me and attaches a safety pin to my sweater. In that moment, she presses her hands to my heart-space and I feel an energy—what must surely be a type of magic—flood through me. I cannot deny the experience as I am awash in the tide that lingers even as she makes her way to enrapture the next person. Through her thoughtful touch, she takes something mundane and familiar—the safety pin—and transforms it into a medicine.

Caught in the flood, I am carried back/across six months earlier to vanessa's classroom where I was a student. As she pins past and present together, I remember vanessa has taught me to follow “the current of my consciousness”⁴ as it flows through the gap between the two. She creates an opening through which I can watch the scene at Fountain of Time as it merges with my memory of the work we did in class: sitting around a table with vanessa as she channels a poem with us, each of us offering a word, phrase, or color to be woven into the assemblage of sound that becomes a meditation. I am reminded as I watch vanessa pressed to a tree, touchingfeeling, that knowledge that I have forgotten to remember comes only through being.

Does the wisdom that rises through her come from this rhizomatic rootedness in no place but all places in time at once? Does it heal her in the ways that she has helped facilitate my own healing? If everything you touch you change, what happens to everything you feel?

Performance at the Fountain of Time, Washington Park by vanessa german, Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
german gives us an education in listening to feeling, in learning to “recognize the frequency of yes.”⁵ In class, we practiced mark making free of judgment by silencing the critic and surrendering to our consciousnesses. Together, we transformed lumps of clay, tiny portions of personal yet communal earth with only one instruction: leave a hole and leave a fingerprint. Our pieces came together in THE SOUL IS A LIBRARY I and II (all works 2024). The conjuring we did in class lingers as you continue through the exhibit, pushing you to wonder what it might look like to lead, create, and simply be heart-first. Indeed, for german, the opposite of love isn't hate or indifference—but judgment, and we make with this in mind.


THE SOUL IS A LIBRARY I and II, 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.

THE SOUL IS A LIBRARY II, 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
german narrates the story of the class's inception and expounds upon Sun Ra's influence on the work in Heart-Opener (pyramid). As her voice floats through the attached headphones (not pictured) and a stellated dodecahedron spins atop a lapis turntable, she recounts a story, she casts a spell:


Heart-Opener (pyramid), 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
As she worked to enact such a space in the Chicago classroom, she unknowingly initiated a sculptural encounter with Sun Ra. He followed her to her studio and elicited a pull within her to create a four-sided, golden pyramid, despite architecture and geometry having never made their way into her work before. Soon after the pull expanded into a knowing and she began to assemble the sculpture, “Tapestry From An Asteroid” by Sun Ra rang out from her studio manager's playlist. Heart-Opener (pyramid) had already been completed with its crystal antennae calling out to him when german finally saw a video of Sun Ra's 1989 performance on late-night show Night Music, wherein he produces a four-sided, golden pyramid that rhymed with the one she had just created. Sun Ra must surely be nodding to her across time, both producing and answering her call.


Heart-Opener (pyramid), 2024. vanessa german in her studio. Photo by Jordan Whitten.
Throughout german's exhibition, this notion of interconnection, of reaching across timespace to a past and future that are always already present, comes through the motif of extended hands. Usually, they reach up: up and out from the crown of the rose quartz-assembled head in Chicago Altar of Love inspired by the ride-share driver who told me how to make it in Chicago, she says: Don't be Afraid. Keep Your Eyes Open (2024); up and out from the top of a black onyx head suspended within a found basketball hoop in Dr. Massey and The Nature of the Known Universe; up and out of a wrought iron sigil in INTUITIVE MAGIC AND THE BODY. Each of these hands, covered in gold, look to reach up (to touch) and out (to feel).


Dr. Massey and the Nature of the Known Universe, 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
Occasionally, the hands take on different forms. For instance, Sun Ra's golden hand “rising up the back to carry the night of sounds on his infinite and eternal shoulders”⁶ in Master Blaster; or, Boombox from the 5th dimension. His pyrite hand rises up and out from the earth that props up the boombox while still being a part of it, rooting into a groundedness while reaching to join a symphony of blue minerals. You might easily miss his pat on the back if you ignore the voice coaxing you to orbit the sculpture completely, if you forget to remember to maintain awareness of all that exists around and within and through you even when not directly in front of you. Whether you catch it or not, there is an antidote that flows from his gleaming palm, edging around the corners, seeking and finding you regardless of whether you see it coming.


(left) Love Song; or The Quelling of that Great Grief of Immortality, 2024, (center) Master Blaster; or, Boombox from the 5th dimension, 2024, (right) THE HEALER— ,2024, (far right) INTUITIVE MAGIC AND THE BODY, 2024.

Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.

THE HEALER— is the only work in the exhibit that has two hands and it is the only work where the hands are outstretched. Strung along its torso are the prayer beads we made in class, now dipped in gold and bound to one another—our prayer beads are our first lesson in german's method of assemblage, one that carefully brings together found objects, earth, and intention to teach us about the inextricability of the one from the whole. Our intentions work together and reach out, all “the grace [you] could imagine”⁷ emanating from the fingertips of the twinned golden appendages.


INTUITIVE MAGIC AND THE BODY, (left) 2024, (center) THE HEALER— , 2024, (right) Heart-Opener (pyramid), 2024, (under Heart-Opener (pyramid) Chicago Altar of Love inspired by the ride-share driver who told me how to make it in Chicago, she says: Don't be Afraid. Keep Your Eyes Open, 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
german's work is the completed object and experience of her exhibition title, the poem that explicates it. She honors the psychic process of assembly—recognizing that all that she touches will change her and whatever she has touched will change the piece. She also recognizes that not all that she touches and that touches her can be seen. The work, then, is also as much the object as the feeling that goes into it. Thus, in this exhibition and others, german works with both materials such as rose quartz, sodalite, sea jasper, plaster—and immaterials:

“deep affection for humankind,”⁸

“a redemption song hummed on the way to the kitchen,”⁹

“the directness of a conscious gaze,”¹⁰

“the healing bodies of water touching the land that we know of as Chicago,”¹¹

“ancestors to come,”¹²

“the beginning and the end switching places all the time,”¹³

“crying out for justice, the Congo, the Sudan,”¹⁴

“love and grief with no space between them.”¹⁵

Within everything she creates, there is literal and metaphysical laying on of hands, and there cannot be healing without an acknowledgement of pain. german, who describes herself as “mostly earthling,”¹⁶ teaches us to feel and dream for the world with reminders of the human injustices and genocides happening around us: Gaza, Congo, Sudan—within her work there is always love and also grief, at the same time.

Prophecy comes to us through unspectacular teachers so long as we maintain an open awareness. Each class, our homework is to bring a magical object and a magical immaterial. I return to THE SOUL IS A LIBRARY I and spot a damaged watch I carried to class and gave vanessa. The watch's face is dark brown and the hands are rose gold. The second hand is broken, disconnected from the others, haphazardly pointing to the numbered date, frozen in time. There will be ten moments when the watch will be correct throughout the duration of the exhibition, but the second hand will always be askew. There will never be an instance of wholeness without holding the broken. It reminds me that we “cannot truly be blindsided by anything”¹⁷ because there is prophecy all around and within us.

In Altar of Grief and Transformation from the place where I was scammed by humans out of $700 one night in chicago when I had a mean toothache and the pain had blinded my common senses, german demonstrates the importance of touchingfeeling even in moments when it's easier to numb and safer to hide.

Touchingfeeling is represented here by a blue gardening glove as a hand. It does not reach up or out, but falls flat from under a sequined pillow upon which a lapis-kyanite-sodalite head lies. It is the only hand in the exhibit we might literally try on: a grief meant to be witnessed, shared. There is the blue, limp hand, but—as it lies against a mirrored rectangular prism—there is also the shadow of that hand, and the reflection of that hand, and the reflection of the shadow of that hand, an allegory for how grief spills out, flooding, pouring beyond its bounds. It is here, yet elsewhere as well. It does not sit in isolation but also reaches and also touches, and in so doing, changes and is changed, feels and is felt. At the feet of the teacher that is grief, we are collectively transformed.


Altar of Grief and Transformation from the place where I was scammed by humans out of $700 one night in chicago when I had a mean toothache and the pain had blinded my common senses, 2024. Installation view of vanessa german's Gray Center Fellowship Exhibition, 2024, at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist / Kasmin, New York; Logan Center Exhibitions; and the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman and Robert Salazar.
I have not been scammed out of money today, but too often, it's hard not to feel like the Academy is taking something valuable away from me. Today, I cannot conceal enough sorrow to keep it out of the classroom space, so I allow soundless tears to stream down my face. I enter the space vanessa has constructed as the paraäcademy because it seems to me the best salve to the pain enacted by its foil. Under her redemptive tutelage, I allow the mundane to be felt as extraordinary, as a complete catalog of the pains that I have felt once and now again. vanessa must see me because she guides us in a meditation that seeks to take our grief and alchemize it into something that can fly; to make it small enough that it can fit into our hands; to take it, loving it completely before allowing it to fly away.

What happens when we hold awareness for the ways that love and grief appear within the body as record of a reality that can be bent, is bending now as we approach it with

a prayer

a meditation

“a focused hope?”¹⁸

During one of our last classes, vanessa gives a mini artist talk about her rose quartz pieces. She casually mentions being a triple empath, but the concept stays with me, so it's the first question I ask when interviewing her for Portable Gray. Triple empathy—prescient feeling, seeing, knowing—contributes to her heightened state of awareness: “It's not just the feeling, but it's the feeling that comes before the feeling and it's the space in between knowing about that, the is-ness of it.”¹⁹ Her explanation makes me wonder again about touchingfeeling and my mind resurfaces Lauren Olamina's condition of hyperempathy in Parable of the Sower: her orientation to being is structured by literally feeling the pain and pleasure of others. If Lauren can even feel a bullet through the flesh of a dog or a lover's tingling euphoria, how much must she always be transformed and transforming through witnessing the effervescent flow of all forms of life through her? What happens when we, like Lauren, like vanessa, allow our bodies and sensoria to be radically porous as a way of perceiving, experiencing the world?

With golden hands, with a blue hand, with grief, with love—all without judgment—german is a prophet for the world. Her vision is clear, prescient while present, assembling disparate pieces into cohesion, transmuting the pain of existence into something beautiful without erasing the anguish. german's work holds us responsibly in both love and grief, leads us today, yesterday, and tomorrow for here and now, providing us an image of ourselves and all we might still be in spite of _______. As we become brave enough to “look to the edges of [our realities]”²⁰ and find that those edges blur softly into familiar focus, we might begin to understand why she behooves us to remember:

There are no destinations, only origins.”²¹

1. touchingfeeling: to approach emotion with curiosity and awareness, an acceptance of its flow, an openness to experience; also/or stirring sensation (v.) // sensation stirring (n.) ↩


2. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, 1993. ↩


3. Interview with vanessa german by Solana Adeokun in vanessa german's “The Artist as the Complete Technology of Being-ness,” Portable Gray issue 12: Paraäcademia, 2024. Published by the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. ↩


4. Paraphrased from class conversation with vanessa german. ↩


5. Author's interview with vanessa german in vanessa german's “The Artist as the Complete Technology of Being-ness,” Portable Gray issue 12: Paraäcademia, 2024. ↩


6. vanessa german, Master Blaster; or, Boombox from the 5th dimension, 2024.↩


7. From Baby Suggs's sermon in the Clearing in Toni Morrison's Beloved, 1987. ↩


8. vanessa german, Chicago Altar of Love inspired by the ride-share driver who told me how to make it in Chicago, she says: Don't be Afraid. Keep Your Eyes Open, 2024. ↩


9. vanessa german, Love Song; or The Quelling of that Great Grief of Immortality, 2024. ↩


10. Ibid. ↩


11. german, Chicago Altar of Love. ↩


12. Ibid. ↩


13. vanessa german, Master Blaster; or, Boombox from the 5th Dimension, 2024. ↩


14. german, Love Song. ↩


15. german, Master Blaster. ↩


16. vanessa german's instagram bio. ↩


17. vanessa german's sonic words from Heart-Opener (pyramid), 2024. ↩


18. vanessa used these terms interchangeably, each as synonymous with the other. ↩


19. Author's interview with vanessa german in vanessa german's “The Artist as the Complete Technology of Being-ness,” Portable Gray issue 12: Paraäcademia, 2024. ↩


20. Paraphrased from a note from vanessa german to the author. ↩


21. Placard in the exhibition. ↩

Photo by Jeremy Franklin.

Rhya Marlene Moffitt is a PhD Candidate in the Black Studies cohort in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Rhya is currently writing a dissertation that explores Black anxiety, madness, and the process of coming to a Black feminist consciousness. Her writing has been published in Contemporaries, The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, MELUS, and elsewhere. Rhya is also an educator and curriculum designer with experience teaching middle schoolers through undergraduates.