Connect What is your favorite type of art to create?

My favorite art forces people to look deeper at themselves. I want my work to be a mirror for the human experience, exciting, saddening, and conflicting all at once. My first love, dance, is seen as soft and delicate, yet it can be rigid and aggressive. My tapestry work carries the same tension. Yarn evokes warmth and comfort, yet I use it to create large-scale murals that challenge what soft materials can say. My favorite art to create is whatever holds up that mirror.

Where do you find inspiration?

I find inspiration in the Black experience. It brings me great joy to create murals of Black and brown people and showcase our beauty in an expansive way. Artists like Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley amplify Blackness without minimizing our impact, influence, or culture. My hope is to do the same. My work exists to unapologetically bring Blackness to the forefront and demand the recognition we have always deserved, without the fear of erasure or of being “unraveled.”

What would you do with $25,000?

I want to say I would purely pour it back into my art, but I also have bills to pay. Rent, groceries, gas, electric, WiFi, and potentially moving somewhere safer. Once that foundation is handled, I would pour into everything else. Supporting my family, renting studio space, buying canvases and crochet materials for future projects, and prayerfully saving for the future. A stable Jessica is a creative Jessica, and that is who I want to show up as every day.