Artist Jonah Elijah on Leaving the House and Making His Mark on the Earth
Interview by Shelley Holcomb
Through paintings, installations, and performances, artist Jonah Elijah offers his audience a representational view of what it’s like to be Black today. His work explores rituals of leaving the house, fighting for freedom, and what it means to leave your mark as an artist. We sat down with the Claremont Graduate University alumni to talk about how he gives himself the freedom to play in his work, and how his practice immerses viewers into his personal experiences.
Shelley Holcomb (Curate LA): Tell me about your background, your origin story, where you’re from, how you started doing art, all of that.
Jonah Elijah: I’m born and raised in the Third Ward community from the inner city part of Houston, Texas. I went to the University of Texas at San Antonio and I got my Bachelor of Arts there. That’s kind of where I discovered painting. I discovered it in a painting class for non-art majors. I was a business major at the time. When I took that class for painting, I fell in love. The rest is just about history.
I applied for grad school and was accepted to Claremont Graduate University. I saw it as a ticket out of Texas and I moved here to Los Angeles. I only decided to go two weeks before school started. I told my mom I was moving to California, did my program, then COVID hit a couple of weeks before my thesis show, and now we’re here.
Shelley: Before you took that painting class, was there anything in your childhood that would have indicated to yourself that you were an artist?
Jonah Elijah: Most definitely. When I was in the second or third grade, my aunt was actually an artist. She was a designer. She had a little lightbox and every day after school, as a second/third grader, whatever it was, I would print out all of the Dragonball Z characters and I would sit there after doing homework, and I would trace them. I fell in love with that.
As I got older, I kind of stopped tracing and drawing. I always knew I could do it, but I was an athlete. I was always playing different sports, like hooping or playing football. In college, I knew I wasn’t going to go to the NBA and so I was like, “Man, what else am I good at?” That’s where I started back sketching.
Shelley: I only know a few people who are artists that were previously athletes, and I feel like they are a very specific type of artist. How did being an athlete influence your artistic practice?
Jonah: I think it influences my artistic practice, because, growing up, I always wanted to perfect my jump shot, or perfect throwing strikes, or perfect catching a football. I think it’s the practice, just going out there with this repetition, trying to perfect the form. That kind of travels into my art practice now. I feel like any time I put some paint on my palette, I’m shooting free throws, but I’m doing brush strokes, and I’m getting in here practicing every day.
Shelley: In your work you’re using sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Can you talk a little bit about all of the different mediums that you use? And in your mind, is there a specific reason for them when you use them?
Jonah: I just feel like a kid in a candy store. I want everything. So I’m using everything I can use to just make some work and put down a mark. Oil pastels, acrylic, crayons, newspaper, anything I get my hands on.
Actually, I started to do those things, like assemblage using found objects and performance at CGU. One of my teachers had a conversation with me and planted that seed, he was looking at all my paintings and he was like, “You kind of are already doing it with the imagery you are painting, why not explore real objects?” So I went out in the backyard of the school and I was looking around. I realized I can use found objects to help me tell the story a little bit better by using the actual material I was painting about. I think the found material is expanding the paintings. The painting and the assemblage works are one and the same now.
Shelley: I’ve noticed some of your paintings are super abstract and surreal, but then you also have some that are specifically representational, as if they were a snapshot. I get major narrative vibes, like you’re telling a story and you want people to follow along. Is that intentional?
Jonah: Yeah, it is definitely intentional. I was always interested in all these different styles. Honestly, some days I just feel like making something abstract. I just give myself freedom with it. I don’t restrict myself to one thing. I get to just play with all these different styles.
Shelley: So, what’s the process behind the more realistic ones?
Jonah: It’s like me trying to calm down. It’s me putting a microscope on this painting and just taking one thing from it. I told myself, “OK, Jonah. Just do one thing. Keep it simple.” I don’t always have to go crazy. I had a conversation with Mario Ybarra Jr. at CGU, and he was like, “Jonah, you always have these 10-minute songs. All you need is that 2-minute song, that one that’s in the club,” and that resonated with me.
Shelley: Yeah, that’s a really great way of describing it, actually. So, quoting a line from your bio on your website, your paintings are “abstracted or representational views into what it’s like to be Black today”, can talk about how you accomplish this?
Jonah: I think sometimes it’s tough when you’re doing something abstract, because it is abstract, but the key thing for me is to always put in some signifiers, or things that I can relate to — things that are from my experience. And I think there’s this moment when somebody who’s looking at the work can notice what that is. That’s where I play with the Black experience and it allows the viewer to have some type of relationship to it. And then I challenge myself to take it further — even though I’m making paintings from my experience — how can I tie in the viewer to my work? How can they relate to it? It’s not always about me. What can the viewer take from it and what can they learn from it?
I think that’s important in my work. I don’t want to put it specifically on one person. I think it would be selfish if I just made it, for example, strictly for Black people. It’s for everybody, because I feel like somebody might see something in it totally different from what I put it in there for, and they can relate to it and have their own narrative with it. But I think if someone with a shared experience as me saw it, they would have this connection to it.
Shelley: So maybe you can show me a specific work that does this?
Jonah: This one is called “Footsteps in the Dark.” It’s about this feeling I’m sure a lot of people can relate to, of going downstairs to the kitchen when you want to get a late night snack, and you have to cut the lights off to go back to your room. It’s that paranoid feeling you have when you have to look back in that dark room and you imagine a scary face or something. When I was younger and would go downstairs in the middle of the night, I would cut off the light and I would fly up the stairs because I was so scared of the dark.
But I think that is a feeling and type of fear that Black people face going out into the world every day. We get that same feeling when we see a police car behind us, for example. I mean, I really got that feeling just yesterday. I was driving on my way to work and a police car got behind me and I realized I didn’t have my license on me. So I was like, “Oh, this is going to be trouble.” When he got in front of me, it was this fear and a stomach-drop, like, “Nooooo”… He didn’t pull me over and I made it back in, but still, it’s that same feeling, like damn. It’s that paranoia, that familiar dark feeling.
Shelley: And what of the title of the work?
Jonah: The name is an Isley Brothers title for a song, “Footsteps in the Dark,” which is a love song, so I’m kind of, like, playing with the love song and playing with paranoia in that love song. That’s something Basquiat used to do. He used to title his works by different Black artists and different musicians. I wonder if he was still alive, would he still be doing that thing — honoring Black artists and, you know, still giving them a way into his work?
Shelley: Let’s talk about this installation, “Mark The Earth.” What does that mean to you?
Jonah: This was my very first stab at doing installation. I was just putting things in a room and trying to find a narrative from it, and I was thinking about the term “mark the earth” and how we want to leave a mark on our paintings, but also, as regular people, we want to leave our mark on people with whatever makes us significant.
And then I was thinking about the different marks that’ve been left on this planet Earth. That red in the work on the wall is the transatlantic slave trade route. That red is a mark that’s been left on the Earth.
The Black Superman is there because I made that Superman Black. And you know, you never actually see Black people in the cartoon. And if it was an actual cartoon, like, who would he be saving and where would it start? Like, would he start with the transatlantic slave trade, turning the boats around, picking the boats up and taking them back to Africa? I was just thinking, like, dang that would be dope. Would Black Superman be saving us from police brutality, stopping us from getting shot?
Shelley: One thing that stood out for me about this work is the use of negative space and how you’re framing these three-dimensional works with two-dimensional frames. Can you talk about that?
Jonah: Yeah, since this was my first installation, I was trying to come out of that phase of only doing two-dimensional paintings. So this is actually to me, what my paintings would look like if they were three-dimensional.
And I think those frames were just helping me. It was supposed to be interactive, so if you are in a space, you can actually sit in that chair. It’s like whoever comes in, you will be a part of that pain.
Shelley: So, in that same vein, I want to talk about your use of your own body in your work, how we start to see actual traces or imprints of you?
Jonah: In “Black.Brown.Red.,” I was really in this moment where I wanted to start using my body to make my marks and kind of start with the idea of “mark the earth.”
Within the installation, I actually had the TV playing the process of me making that punching bag painting. I wanted people to sit down and actually watch the process of me making this piece about power and how we’re going to have to fight for our freedom and we’re going to have to continue to fight.
In that performance I was actually bleeding. My hands are bleeding making it, and there’s actually blood on that bag, it’s a piece showing that we’re going to have to fight for what we want. At the end of the day, you just never know what’s going to happen.
Shelley: And again, we see the recycling of textures and objects from other installations.
Jonah: Yes, I still have the Black Superman there. I’m just like setting up that house as my practice grows, setting up that environment, still making it a little homey, combining those elements of my mom’s house and my dad’s house.
I try to combine the two different lives I was living weekly growing up. With the punching bag, that is like a scene from my father’s house, and the newspapers in front of the TV is the scene from my mother’s house.
Shelley: And I mean, at least to me, you’re setting a scene for you as an artist and threading these motifs throughout all of your works. With installation, obviously it’s not permanent, and it’s super interesting that you are recycling these objects. It really lets the viewer into your mind a bit more intimately.
Jonah: Right, Most definitely.
Shelley: OK, so for the next work I want to talk about the title, “Home is where the hatred is.”
Jonah: So this one, I actually had the Gil Scott Heron song playing; “Home Is Where the Hatred Is.” The centerpiece is like a makeshift moment of getting ready to leave the house, which is a theme I explore a lot in my work. And I was thinking about that same paranoid feeling that is always involved with getting ready to leave the house as a Black man.
In my house we use anything to make it work. Like, I use that wooden sculpture as a hat rack or to hang my shoes. And usually when we hang shoes like that in the hood, it means somebody passed away right there. And all of these clothes we see here, it’s sort of like, anything we wear, whether it’s a “Black power,” or “Black Lives Matter” shirt, it really doesn’t even matter when we go out into the world because police see straight through it. But it’s motivational, though, at least.
The painting to the left was a performance. I painted the front of my body white and laid on that panel. I was thinking about how we have our hands up, “hands up, don’t shoot,” but also about how it is when you land on the floor after being shot. How they draw chalk on the ground around a dead body.
Shelley: Can you talk about the domino motif that we see often in your work?
Jonah: I use dominoes in my work a lot and I use them in anthropomorphic ways. And in this one specifically, this one is called “five for five compromise.” So I’m actually making a work that is going against the Three-fifths Compromise, which in the Constitution, they basically made African slaves, or us, three-fifths of a man. So in this particular domino I’m playing with the numbers. You see three black dots at the top, but the other dots are a red and a green one. I’m saying we’ve always been equal.
Shelley: The next installation that I’m very excited to talk about is called “Human Cafe.” What is going on here?
Jonah: This one I actually brought in some real grass for and the painting on the wall is called “The First Supper.” I’m playing with the name because on the opposite wall I actually had a print out of “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci. I purposefully had them in conversation.
I was thinking about if the roles were reversed between animals and humans, what if these animals were in this restaurant called the Human Cafe, and they were able to pick from different races, like order Black people, white people, brown people?
The cow is actually eating the brown breast, or a Black woman’s breast. If we’re thinking about history, the Black breast was actually feeding the slave masters’ children. I was also just thinking, like, “what body parts would they eat that would be the most nutritious?” Maybe the thigh, of course, but I was thinking that the breast would probably be something to get full from. And then, yeah, we actually get milk from the breasts and we drink the cow’s milk — everything was just having a conversation.
Shelley: I like how you hung the three separate canvases to be one. And there are these slits in between, was that premeditated?
Jonah: I did the pig painting first. I just put it on the wall and I nailed it and I gessoed it and it stayed like that. So I was like, OK, this is actually cool. And this is kind of like, you know, the way the skin of animals is stretched and kind of like how cow’s hides are tanned.
Shelley: So what about the centerpiece? What’s on the table?
Jonah: That’s a hand that I molded out of Styrofoam. With the installations I’m making, I always want them to be interactive in some way, and in this one I want you to really feel like you might be on the menu. If you were a human walking in the human cafe, you’re the food.
And the red chair below the paintings says “Da Booty” on it. I wanted people to sit down at the table and actually feel what it would be like to sit down at the table with the chicken, the cow, and the pig, while they order human for dinner.
Shelley: Let’s talk about your thesis exhibition, Black Inhale, can you explain the title and the work you included?
Jonah: Oh, yes. So my show was supposed to be in March 2020 and it got postponed because of COVID. That show was going to be called ‘Razd’, which meant “something to be lifted to a higher level.” But that was scratched because I was just thinking about everything that happened in the summer with police brutality.
I was thinking about “in hell,” and also “inhale.” We’re not able to breathe in this world or in America, this is hell for us. And the work is kind of autobiographical, it’s kind of like a day in my life or the life of a Black man. The works are curated in a little circle that narrates the concept of getting ready to walk out of the house and go into the world. If you walk around the grass, it just leaves you in this cycle of my experience and, for some, a lot of Black people’s experiences. I wanted to combine all of these concepts with Black Inhale.
This first piece in this rotation is called “It Gets Better.” This is like a collage of certain scenes from my childhood, just thinking about these moments in my life, how like I have my toe coming out of the sock, and that’s like this thing that I know a lot of people can relate to. [laughs] Like everybody’s had that moment where you’ve got a hole in your sock and you go somewhere, and you have to take your shoes off so you try to come up with every excuse not to take your shoes off. But, yeah, I’m just thinking about those moments of getting ready, putting on my shoes, and getting ready to go out into the world.
Shelley: So who is this lone, large portrait we see in the exhibition?
Jonah: This painting is called “The Hood Messenger.”
Before this painting, it was you put on shoes, check your money in the shoe box, and then you actually make your way out into my community, into the world. And this guy, specifically where I’m from, is notoriously known for being on several corners in three different parts of Houston at the same time, and he was always selling the Final Call newspapers. These guys, who are part of the Nation of Islam, they’re in every Black and brown neighborhood trying to get the message out, trying to spread the message to the people in the community, something that we can be fed on and some knowledge of what’s really going on in the world. And to me, he’s the hood messenger.
Next in the rotation, we see “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” The TV is a picture frame that is wrapped with canvas and I put dominoes inside the TV. I was using dominoes and their placements as calamity, almost like they all just laid out. Surrounding the TV, I have more recent issues of the Final Call newspapers, some of them say don’t take this vaccine, some say “Justice for Breonna Taylor,” another says “Justice for George Floyd.” And I was thinking about how the revolution is, how it’s two different stories being told. And why is that?
I think that goes back to the guy holding the newspapers, the actual Final Call newspapers, how he’s getting the message out to the people, trying to get them to know something deeper than what was going on on the TV.
Shelley: Honestly, when I saw the piece in the installation with the punching bag video, I thought about the concept of “the revolution will not be televised,” except, I feel like in that piece, you’re actually doing the opposite. You’re kind of forcing us to sit there and watch, watch the revolution happen in your performance on the television.
Jonah: That’s true. That is the revolution.
Shelley: And the piece with the rope, how does it relate to this conversation about the revolution?
Jonah: That one’s called “A Blackman was lynched by the Police Yesterday.”
acrylic, oil, oil pastels, rope on wood [Photo by Brian Jones]
I had some rope in my studio and I just started tying it up. I was having a conversation with Dred Scott. In 2015 he remade something that the NAACP made back in the 60s that said, “A man was lynched by the police,” and that was it. And he put, “yesterday.” And I added, “A Black man was lynched by the police yesterday.” And my iteration of it was actually this painting.
And I wanted to add to the concept of “lynched.” I was playing with that word, too, with the rope. Lynched means shot and it also means being hung. Being hung back in the day is what being shot by the police is today. That was my way of modernizing this conversation. The same conversation that Driscol was having.
So in the context of the exhibition, we start off in the house, we get out to the world, we see our people (“The Black Connection”), we see how we are all connected, we see “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and then that piece with the rope, those are all of these deaths out in the world. We’re seeing another killing of a Black man.
Shelley: And lastly, what’s happening with the sculpture in the middle of the room?
The centerpiece is a memorial in a sense. It’s called “Do (Black) Men Know?” But the “Black” is in parentheses and it basically spells out domino. And I just kind of broke that word down. And I think all of this — when I was doing this show — was around the time that Daniel Cameron basically sold us out with the Breonna Taylor trial, how he let off the police officers. So that’s why it was titled “Do (Black) Men Know?” Men as in women or men.
Shelley: Meaning do they, like, fully understand the suffering?
Jonah: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Do we know what’s going on?
Where I’m from, I have friends from the hood. A lot of stuff that’s going on in the news is not really that big of a deal because we’re all trying to survive at the end of the day. I feel like sometimes I need to get the message out to the people in the city that are actually living in it. We know we’re trying to survive not only police killings, but the chance of us killing us in my neighborhood is also a big threat. How can we stop what’s going on in our neighborhoods and have like this Black connection? Do we know how we are all connected? Do we know?
Shelley: And speaking of connection, how has the pandemic and isolation affected your work?
Jonah: That’s a good question. It really hasn’t affected my work. I mean, it made me dive deeper into myself, I think, which made me dive deeper into my work, and dive deeper into what I want to say in my work.
Shelley: What is inspiring you right now?
Jonah: It’s like something new every day and I get inspired by just waking up. I know that’s such a cliche answer, but just waking up every day to go work. I’ve been working on murals with Michael Massenburg, he’s been in the game for a while and he’s still working, still young, still getting down on the walls, and I’m assisting him.
So that’s what’s inspiring me every day — just being alive, learning, creating, and having conversations with him.
Shelley: So then the last question is, what are you currently working on and what are your future projects or is there anything you have coming up that you want to plug?
Jonah: So right now I’m assisting Michael Massenburg. We just did a mural for Venice Beach Recreation Center in South Central. And now we’re doing another mural for the Community Coalition, off of Vermont and 81st Street.
Future projects? I just got my studio, so I’m enjoying this space, it’s like my first real studio outside of school and yeah, it is pretty nice and it’s a blessing to have it. I went from a garage, so to speak, to CGU, and now, I’m actually a real artist in an actual studio, I feel.
Another future project I’m thinking about doing: multiple versions of those punching bags. I want to do some in different colors and broadcast it as a performance. Now is the perfect time.
And other than that, I’m just continuing to work here and figure things out. Try not to go crazy and just continue to paint.
Shelley: Maybe you should go a little crazy, though, right?
Jonah: Alright, alright, I think I’ll let it all out on those punching bags. Take a bunch of my energy I’ve been bottling up. Just let it out.
Follow Jonah Elijah on Instagram at @jonah.elijah and visit his website to see more work. All images courtesy of the artist.
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