vanessa german, Lifted
For Arts Landing, 2026
Calling all Pittsburgh residents over the age of 100. Send us photos of your hands and be a lasting part of downtown Pittsburgh!
For Arts Landing, acclaimed citizen artist vanessa german will create Lifted, a transformative public artwork in the form of sculptural benches that honor Pittsburgh’s elders—those whose lives, labor, and legacies have helped build the soul and structure of the city.
In Lifted, german will gather tracings of the hands of Pittsburgh residents over the age of 100—centenarians whose lives span generations of change and resilience. These tracings will form the foundation of her bench designs, which will be cast in aluminum and permanently installed facing the city’s bridges and rivers—symbols of movement, memory, and enduring connection. The benches will be unveiled in Spring 2026.
Submit Photo or Join Us In Person
Over a three-month period, german will lead a series of deeply intentional community engagements with senior centers, churches, libraries, and neighborhood organizations across the city. These interactions will serve not only to collect hand tracings, but to create moments of reverence, storytelling, and intergenerational exchange—central to german’s practice of healing through art.
Lifted is a tribute:
In honor of those whose hands have held us up.
Hands we may never have seen, though their work is present in every bridge crossed, every home built, every table set.
The machinists and steelworkers, the caretakers and dreamers, whose breath and labor shaped our city.
To sit on one of these benches is to be held by history—to be supported, quite literally, by the lives of those who came before. Lifted reminds us that we are never alone. That we are surrounded by evidence of human care, perseverance, and generosity. That every act of building, teaching, nurturing, and imagining continues to echo.
To be lifted up—always.
By submitting your tracings and/or stories (“Submissions”), you grant the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust (the “Trust”) and german a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, and transferable license for the Submissions. This license includes the right to use, edit, create derivative works from, publish, and distribute the Submissions in any form, without compensation to you, for the limited purpose of vanessa german’s work Lifted, including its creation, promotion, and documentation. You confirm that the Submissions are original and do not infringe upon any copyright or intellectual property rights of others. The Trust and german reserve the right to decide whether to edit and use any Submission and are not obligated to do so.
About the artist
German is a visionary force in contemporary art, known for her powerful fusion of sculpture, performance, and communal ritual. Her work embodies a spiritual and material alchemy, using beads, crystals, glass, found objects, and sacred relics of everyday life to create resonant figurative forms. Self-taught and singular, german channels art as a technology of love, healing, and remembrance—a means of lifting others up through presence, story, and sacred attention.