Jaleeca Yancy

What happens when an artist creates outside of traditional confines, especially with the purpose of reclaiming and sharing our histories? With work spanning across abstraction, installation, natural dyes, graphic design, and more, the backbone of Jaleeca Yancy’s practice is radical imagination, an idea that’s especially relevant in a time when we’re fighting to imagine new ways of existence. Coinciding with this radical imagination is a passion for sharing our mythologies and folklore, which unfolds the unknown layers of our histories and prompts us to investigate what we believe to be true. Jaleeca weaves a delicate thread across many creative realms, with each one encouraging our curiosity. 

What mediums do you work in and how would you describe your practice?

Right now, I’m mainly working in mixed media, and one of the bases of that media is natural pigments and botanical dyes, with textiles and upcycled textiles to be specific. I’m experimenting with wood paneling, natural dyes, and other mixed media materials in my toolkit. Diving back into that realm of mixed media has been nice for me because I can get tied up doing the natural dye work since it’s so labor-intensive. 

As of right now, my favorite medium is natural dyes – specifically indigo, hibiscus, and weld, which is a small, thorny plant that you can use as a base color to extend other colors.

My practice is rooted in “radical imagination,” as I like to say, because I don’t think there’s been a space for a lot of Black creatives to get outside the realm of everyday life, take what we want in our consciousness, and put it into the world in our own ways.  I think abstraction is pure like radical imagination.

When did you begin creating and how did you get your start?

I’ve always done mixed media art, and if we had to put some years on it, I would say for 12 to 15 years. I studied marketing and graphic design in college, and I come from a household where I had to decide between college or the military. I’m a military kid, and my parents were very creative people, but they still had this rhetoric that they wanted me to follow. So with that, I decided to get a dual degree in marketing and graphic design. The graphic design part was because I was always playing around with digital art, but I also loved creating art with my hands and expressing myself. 

My practice is rooted in “radical imagination,” as I like to say, because I don’t think there’s been a space for a lot of Black creatives to get outside the realm of everyday life, take what we want in our consciousness, and put it into the world in our own ways. I think abstraction is pure like radical imagination.

I’m happy that I ended up studying marketing and graphic design because, as an artist, you have to be your own marketer, graphic designer, and business person. I started Jry Designs about 13 years ago right after college, and decided that I didn’t want to work corporate anymore. Under that umbrella of owning my own company, I was able to do whatever I wanted in the design world – whether it be graphic design or fine art. 

You’ve been working with abstraction for a while, which isn’t as visible within the Black art world, especially given the market’s emphasis on figurative painting over the last few years. Where did your interest in abstraction stem from & why does it appeal to you? 

I used to do figurative art, and I still love it — it allowed me to comprehend what abstract work I wanted to get into. You have to understand the mediums you work in to be a successful abstract artist – that’s just my personal opinion. I look at Sam Gilliam for example; he experimented with all these different ways of creating abstract art, but he also created all types of art – he was a figurative artist and was part of that golden era before Black people were comfortable being abstract artists. About eight years ago, I decided I was kind of tired. Every time I would show and see my work on the wall, it didn’t feel authentic. I wasn’t trying to separate myself from being amongst figurative artists or anything like that, but I didn’t feel that it was my authentic work at the time.

_{L&R: Harmony of Many Parts Series (2021), acrylic and mixed media on canvas}

I thought my main practice had to be illustration, figurative fine art, or painting using oil or acrylic, and then one day, I came across charcoal and thought, let me try to do some figurative art with this or use it in a mixed media piece. I started experimenting with my backgrounds, and eventually, the backgrounds became the front and the middle grounds, and then it became an abstract piece. I don’t think I became comfortable with saying it was abstract work until I fully eliminated the figure.

One of my great friends invited me to do body paint, and I saw the figure as something totally different –  I saw the figure as an actual canvas and exploration of oneself — it was liberating. For someone to be so comfortable or not comfortable and willing to get outside themselves and allow someone else to paint them, that’s what freedom looks like. I thought, how can I take the same idea of the body and put that into the work I’m creating, so I started digesting new ways and forms and textures that embody a self-portraiture of my mind, body, and soul.

Radical imagination, experimentation, and mythology appear to be core elements in your abstract compositions. Can you share more about how they’re implemented in your work? 

The mythology part is new, which I’m very excited about! I’m doing a lot of research right now, and I’m tired of this idea of “Black girl magic,” but then we’re not seeing it outside of us telling each other it’s “Black girl magic” or other people using it in a mixed way when it’s been around for millennia. We’ve been here doing amazing things, but also our mythology is erased, so we don’t have something to back it. I always thought about how radical it would be if we told our stories and the world knew our mythology and appreciated it. I’m trying to study and research art mythology and art folklore to further inform this.

What I’m trying to do is help with the erasure, retell our stories in an abstract way, but also give information to the people. You know how we were kids, and our parents would hide our vegetables in our pasta, and we’d think, I didn’t know I liked peas all this time?! That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to fake it and make it look like you’re not about to receive some heavy information on the surface, but actually, you’re going to walk away knowing more than you ever learned in American history and more about the African diaspora – that’s where the radical imagination comes from. 

How has your experience growing up in Memphis informed your work at all?

I was born and raised in Memphis until I was about three, but I’m also a military kid, so I didn’t come back to Memphis until my high school years, and it was very difficult at first. When you live on a military base, you’re with a mixed group of people, and your history, specifically Black history, is not taught in bases and military schools – you learn about emancipation and all the lies. My family instilled in me an understanding of my history early on. I lived in Virginia, North Carolina, and then we moved to Okinawa, Japan, and that’s where I first learned about freedom.

Growing up in Okinawa during my pre-teens allowed me to have this understanding of what freedom and responsibility look like, and then moving back to Tennessee and back to America, what that freedom looked like being taken away. I was an outdoor kid and always played outside – I was a nature kid. I had to rediscover that when I moved back to Memphis when I was about 14 or 15, and had to rediscover how to put my shoulders down.

When I graduated high school, I went to college in Nashville, which was a very nature-heavy city at the time. I experienced college life there, but I always sought out nature. I continued to live there for a little while after college, then moved to New York.

During the pandemic, I bought an RV and traveled all around the East Coast, and then I eventually traveled back home to Memphis and lived with my extended family who had a beef farm. At the time, I was fully vegan, so I was like…. I don’t know if this is an alignment, but traveling in my RV – that’s real nature immersion right there! I woke up surrounded by trees, always went hiking, lived a sustainable life, learned perseverance, and was constantly being immersed in creativity. I brought all my art supplies and created in the RV. 

_{L: A Revival of Her Own (2022), indigo, madder root, Saffron on cotton, 36 x 36 in; R: Flashing lights/Fireflies (2022), avocado, hibiscus, longwood, and madder root on linen, 36 x 36 in.}

When I moved back to Memphis in the RV and lived on my family’s beef farm, I met this gentleman who owned an aquaponics farm. When we met, he asked if I was an artist and if I had a space to create; I mentioned that I’ve been creating in my RV and that I’m back home for some time, and he offered a barter. He mentioned that since I’m great at marketing and graphic design, he would love to get some of my expertise and give me free space in return. I never had a studio space until 2020, so I had this huge 18 x 18 sq ft space, and I could get it as messy as I wanted. At that time, my friend was in Morocco and mentioned they saw all these dyes, and it reminded them of how vibrant my work is, so they brought them back for me and that’s how I got into botanical dyes, natural dyes, and my discovery and love for indigo. 

There are a lot of artists right now, especially within the textile and fiber art world, whose work informs sustainability. I’m just one of those voices, and I’m trying to ensure that this work encourages us to be conscientious about the ways we treat the Earth. Everyone has their part to play. 

I was so excited to hear about Haint Blue Waves Triptych, your public sculpture that was displayed on Governors Island last summer, described as “a sustainable sculpture [that] honors Black alchemy, legacy, and folklore.” Can you share a bit more about the piece & how it came into fruition? 

So indigo is the base; that’s what tied all this work together for Haint Blue Waves. Haint blue is a color, and now it’s pretty much a paint color you can generally find down south, especially on the southern East Coast. In the Gullah Geechee country of South Carolina is where indigo was cultivated, and a lot of people don’t understand that history — they just know that indigo grew around North Carolina & South Carolina, but the folklore that comes along with indigo is so fascinating because there are so many tales and I briefly touch on two in this work. The textiles I used in Haint Blue Waves are born mainly within enslavement – cotton and denim are the main ones, but silks, bleached muslin, and some lace are also tied in. I use upcycled textiles as much as possible, and I get those sourced from fabscraps. I took those fabrics and hand-dyed them in many different styles of indigo dyeing. The main indigos I used were Carolinan & Moroccan – which took about three months to hand dye, protect, and dry. 

I was very curious about this idea of haint blue, indigo, and the folklore around it. Indigo is a protective color in folklore, especially in the African diaspora. Enslavement informs colonialism and our history, and what we brought to this country informs that, so you would see many colonial homes painted with haint blue on their porches, because as much as they want to rid us of our spirituality, faiths, rituals, and our herbalism, they also received a lot of it and took it into their practices. Eventually, haint blue became a color sold in wide production but has no tie to its origins — its origins being a natural dye that was cultivated and engineered by enslaved Africans predominantly from West Africa where they mastered indigo dyeing. 

Haint Blue Waves is a portal in a sense to further investigate what’s on Governors Island as well. Governors Island was a military base and was used as one for a long time, but the island was originally purchased from the indigenous people, the Lenape People — they didn’t know the worth of the island, so they thought it was in good favor. The water surrounding that land is the Atlantic, and we all know the history of the transatlantic slave trade. New York was one of the main hubs for the slave trade, which also gets erased because when you’re a metropolitan city that’s supposed to be a melting pot, having that identity doesn’t look good. There’s a lot of erasure of African American history in the city. 

I wanted to play around with this idea that we’re on indigenous land, surrounded by a body of water that has our ancestors and brought our ancestors over, across the water from an actual African burial ground, but also across the water from Staten Island where Sandy Ground was and a Black billionaire made tons of money by being an oyster salesman. With all this history right on top of Nolan Park, we’re playing around with a lot of ghosts, and some people see it as a good thing while others think it’s a bad thing. The ghosts are pretty friendly at the West Harlem Art Fund House, and I’ve never had any problems — they let me do my thing, and I appreciate them for that! With Haint Blue Waves, the history informs the piece, but there we go again talking about the “peas in the pasta.” I needed to present this work in a way that people are intrigued enough to further investigate why the work was there.

This would be a totally different piece if it wasn’t rooted in this specific space, correct?

Correct, it would not look the way it is at all. The space and having agency to create it according to the space always informs the piece and I think it makes the piece much richer and allows it to be what it needs to be – it’s activism.

The sustainability part is important as well because climate change is real and I don’t think Black people are seen as being sustainable. Haint Blue Waves is kind of a radical piece to inform people that we care about these things too. We care about the world, and we shouldn’t be erased from this part of history. We are activists in climate change, and we do our part. A brief conversation about that is in the work. 

I wanted to chat more about sustainability since it’s a strong anchor in your work, the most recent example would be your use of upcycled textiles & poly-plastic garment bags in Haint Blue Waves Triptych but has also been an element of other pieces. What is your stance on sustainability & why is it important for artists and art workers to take it into consideration?

I think people believe it’s a way to cut costs, and it’s not – it’s about being mindful of the materials that you use. Unfortunately, people throw things away every day, and they throw art away, and that ends up in the landfill. We wash our paintbrushes with oils and acrylics, and all these things end up in our water systems. I think that my sustainability is just being a steward for the Earth. I won’t get it perfect all the time, but every little bit counts. If I’m going to make something that informs the world, I’m going to make sure that I’m very conscientious about the materials that are used, so even if it does get disregarded one day, it grows into some beautiful plants – that would be so cool! Just imagine it being the seedlings for a beautiful garden or a crop of trees. I hope that it doesn’t hurt the Earth and just grows along with the natural order of the Earth. 

Being sustainable is an alignment with who I am. To be honest, I’m not doing this for the future. A lot of people mention they’re doing this for their future kids, but I’m worried about right now. All I can do is what I can do in the present, and everything that I’m doing is not new. We’ve been creating textiles with natural dyes for millennia, and we’ve been using fibers to make tools, furniture, baskets, and clothing.  

_{L: Artist & Haint Blue Waves Triptych (2023); R: Artist with indigo on her hands.}

There are a lot of artists right now, especially within the textile and fiber art world, whose work informs sustainability. I’m just one of those voices, and I’m trying to ensure that this work encourages us to be conscientious about the ways we treat the Earth. Everyone has their part to play. 

There are all these master craftspeople, but they’re actually master artists, and we disregard them because if it’s not on canvas and if it doesn’t fit a Eurocentric standard, then it’s not art. That’s something we’re destroying now, which is so beautiful.

I personally feel that I haven’t seen many conversations about sustainability in the art world, aside from textile art, as you mentioned, and I’ll even lump fashion into that. In the broader art world, it doesn’t seem to be on people’s radars. 

No, it’s not. There’s a strict divide in the art world with craftwork & artwork. I don’t see them as a divide because it had to take some type of creativity to do that craftwork, so what makes it not fine art? It’s not fair to pigeonhole artists into a category. I think that textile and fiber artists are finally getting out of that category of being craft artists and finally making their way into being seen as installation fine artists. I’m just happy to be in this time where Legacy Russell did that exhibition, The New Bend, which kind of made the pivot.

The art world does have a funny way of categorizing things to make them less than, and I think this is a way of erasing indigenous art around the world. In Ethiopia, they make these beautiful handcrafted weaved baskets that have lived in people’s families for centuries. In Peru, they’re known for their weaving and natural dye. There are all these master craftspeople, but they’re actually master artists, and we disregard them because if it’s not on canvas and if it doesn’t fit a Eurocentric standard, then it’s not art. That’s something we’re destroying now, which is so beautiful.

Who are a few artists that inspire you?

I always say that it’s my community that first informs the art. I have a beautiful community of all artists – musicians, writers, poets, ceramicists, filmmakers, and they all introduce me to their worlds while I introduce them to my world. I would say community first and then musicians. Billie Holiday is one of my favorite musicians. I love blues and jazz music, and I love the liberation of blues and jazz music. The narrative it takes you through is so just engulfed in beauty, rawness, and this emotionality that’s so pure. I especially love Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Betty Davis, the jazz singer – her voice that helps me through in the studio and helps inform this rhythmic flow of the work. Erykah Badu is a big influence on how I create and on my lifestyle too. 

Around the summertime and late spring, I’m always reading Bell Hooks or Toni Morrison. I’ve also been reading Zora Neale Hurston because of my mythology and folklore work. I’m really diving into Mules and Men right now, and that’s a hard one – it’s always hard for me to get through books that are in old English or old Southern dialect. I definitely use that book as a point of reference even though people come for her and say her books are a lie, but at least she did something with it. I like a lot of plays and read a lot of scripts – I enjoy anything with a beautiful narrative.

_{L: Lawn Open, i (2022); Indigo, Turmeric, Saffron on Wood Panel, 12 x 12 in; R: Lawn Open, iiii (2022); Indigo, Turmeric, Saffron on Wood Panel, 12 x 12 in.}

For visual artists, I love Kerry James Marshall, Nick Cave for sculpture work, Kara Walker and her audacity to do whatever she wants to do and not care about how others receive her stark messages, and Sam Gilliam, of course. He was definitely necessary in changing what a Black artist’s voice looks like, even though it took him a long time. It wasn’t until he was older that he got his flowers.

Definitely Carrie Mae Weems. Betye Saar and Alison Saar – that whole family is just amazing! Vanessa German, who does assemblage work — I really love her work right now, and it’s the epitome of what I’m trying to do, but not as much figurative. The quilters of Gee’s Bend, of course, a lot of Indigenous work — Black Indigenous work, African Indigenous work, and Native American Indigenous work as well. Faith Ringgold is amazing; I like how visceral she is with her narratives but also how calming she is. The balance of her artwork is so interesting. 

What’s something you’re proud of?

Creating the sculpture [Haint Blue Waves] for sure. I’m proud of all the lessons I’ve learned from creating that sculpture and knowing that I can step into making another one in the future. I’m proud of believing in myself because, without that belief, I don’t know if that sculpture would’ve happened. 

Where do you envision yourself and your career in the future? 

I definitely would love to be a part of the Venice Biennale – that would be great! If I had to say what success looks like to me, it’s having an installation there. What it looks like for me is continuing to do exactly what I’m doing now but being financially stable from it. 

I’ve struggled with having committed space for the art practice to really thrive, and I know my practice will thrive once I have a space. I move around a lot – I think that’s the military kid in me, so I’m working on finding grounding and staying anchored in that grounding. In the future, once I find that and find space to carve out, there’s no stopping me.

Can you leave some parting advice for other artists?

Just do it. Just create for yourself. Within that, be proud of that work, and it will take you far. Having confidence is a big thing in this art world, and you have to learn perseverance and how to say yes and no.

Allow the ebbs and flows into your life because it will definitely put you on a path you’re supposed to go. Give into life and live it because it will inform the art. Always stay rooted in yourself.