Behind the scenes during every fair week, there are countless shipping errors, technological breakdowns, hanging malfunctions, and other disasters that art dealers have to contend with on the fly. Luckily, the art market is full of creative minds, many of whom are able to turn “lemons into lemon pie,” as Kevin Tucker, the director of Paris’s Nil Gallery, put it at Untitled Art Fair. Just a few minutes earlier, self-taught artist Vanessa German had performed an impromptu performance that captivated the fair’s opening-day crowd, which was tacitly a way to fix a damaged work en plain air.

“Everything that is broken can have a new life,” she sang loudly, her vibrant voice bouncing off the walls of Untitled’s tent.

Vanessa German, BLUE BOY (The Body of Grief Makes Space
and Light), 2023. Courtesy of Nil Gallery.

Just a day before, with the fair set to open its doors on the beach at 12th Street imminently, the gallery’s staff on the ground realized that a sculpture by German had been improperly crated and damaged in transit.

“I didn’t panic. They showed me the pictures, and I said, ‘I can fix it!’” said German, who had arrived in Miami from the Appalachian Mountains. Her piece, titled BLUE BOY (The Body of Grief Makes Space and Light), which took the center of their booth, is a multimedia sculpture that pays homage to Congolese Nkisi sculptures, which act as protectors for those who own them. The piece is made of recycled materials such as holiday lights, swaths of denim, and bits of mannequin, all painted a vibrant cobalt blue.

The piece had been punctured through the crate it was shipped to Miami in, and German boarded the plane with a pot of that blue paint and not much else on her. “I brought epoxy through TSA!” she said with a laugh. There wasn’t enough space at Untitled for her to fix the piece, so she had no choice but to do so on the floor of the fair.

The performance that she improvised engaged directly with the audience, as German splashed paint on both her sculpture and on the faces of onlookers, performed trust falls, danced, and sang loudly into the faces of those that gathered around the booth. While she engaged with the crowd, she sang heartily: “We are going someplace new, and if you want you can come too, pack up your bag leave your cigarettes behind.”

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