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Pittsburgh-based artist vanessa german turned the living and dining rooms at The Colored Girls Museum into a talismanic temple.

Housed in a three-story, 140-year-old twin home, the museum located in historic Germantown is dedicated to celebrating Black art. Proprietor Vashti Dubois, who has turned her home into the ongoing art project, commissioned german to install her work in honor of the museum’s 10-year anniversary.

The result is three sculptural pieces of  a spiritual triad: “The Table,” “The Oracle” and “The House,” which are made from mostly whimsical and serious found objects, like a chandelier crystal used as a teardrop; and a hole in the forehead of a beadwork bust filled with amethyst crystals, representing wisdom.

“The universe is magical,” said german, who spells her name in lowercase letters. “The universe isn’t ever casual.”

Dubois said she first encountered german’s art in 2023 at the Montclair Art Museum. The exhibition, titled “vanessa german: …please imagine all the things I cannot say…,” featured, among other pieces, a sculptural interpretation of Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware River, which is now on view at the Michener Museum of Art in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Dubois said she immediately felt a connection with the artist and her work.

“As I was standing in her work in Montclair, I was like, ‘This is kinfolk. I know this woman,’” Dubois said. “I often ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this museum?’ The name of her exhibition and the content answered that question: Please imagine all the things I cannot say. This house is the canvas and the vehicle through which I get to express all the things that I don’t have words for.”

Dubois and german then began learning about each other and developing german’s ideas for an installation. Dubois said she was taken aback by german’s request to remove everything from the living and dining rooms, which had been filled with art, and paint the walls black.

“I was, like, ‘Holy cow!’ Dubois said. “I didn’t realize until we started painting, I was, like, ‘Oh my god, she’s calling for a black box theater.’ I’m a theater artist and I’ve been saying for the longest time that theater is part of how this house is organized, but most people don’t see it because they’re not supposed to. But now it’s really unmistakable.”

“The Oracle” is a large head of a woman, made mostly of beadwork and adorned with objects such as teapots and a braided necklace of bottle caps. It rests on “The Table,” a blue drop-leaf table carved with handprints suggesting a ritualistic laying on of hands.

“When you’re making a prayer for someone and it’s a very serious prayer, you say, ‘I will go to the table for you,’” german said. “’I will go to the table for you’ isn’t a thoughts-and-prayers type of thing. It’s like: I will go to the table and I will speak to the element directly.”

In the adjacent room is “The House,” a large figure with three heads and an amorphous body composed of blue-stuffed fabric balls and blue-painted objects, including bottles, shoes, cups and vases.

The three heads represent the past, present and future of the house, german said. The house’s essence has always been onsite, she said, existing well before the foundation was poured, and will continue long after the structure perishes.

“Look at it through the past, present and future. The political and the spiritual and the physical of the house,” german said. “The house is everything.”

Since the 2023 exhibition at Montclair, german has shown work on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a residency and exhibition at the University of Chicago, and a solo exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky of sculptural figures based on 19th century girls of the Louisville Industrial School of Reform, many of whom escaped by forming a climbing rope out of bedsheets.

Although a small institution, german said Germantown’s Colored Girls Museum has outsized importance.

“People focus on scale in museums. They think about scale and curators and the amount of audience that it gets. But the Colored Girls Museum locks into Philadelphia history, into an unbroken chain of power,” she said. “To have a space where colored girls can be free, to have a space where, in the midst of all of levels of what I will say is unsafety, to have a space like that is powerful. It’s speaking directly to the person: ‘It’s been made safe for you to be in there.’”

“The House, the Oracle and the Table” opened in June with a series of ritualistic performances by german. She is expected to return to the house in the fall for an artist talk, and says she will perform another ritual when the installation is unmounted.

“I have to close out the period of the work,” she said. “So I will have to do some performance.”