Art After The Wake: An Interview with Illustrator Jah’China De Leon Written by Ashanté Charles
Edited By Amber Worsley
This year I had the opportunity to work with my friend Amber Worsley’s podcast “After The Wake: Her Story.” A metaphorical response to the Black experience from Black woman. I recruited artist Jah’China De Leon to join us to create the cover art for the podcast. I worked as a photographer and creative director behind the scenes, attending their recording sessions. I was present during a progressive conversation about Black liberation in America, and issues affecting Black woman’s health and representation.
The podcast represents a safe space for Black women to speak and highlight their voices to articulate their stories and experiences. Hosts Khyla Jean and Sharon Wilson embarked on this mission with Amber Worsley, late autumn. Amber writes in her podcast pitch that “After The Wake will serve as an acknowledgment of a new era of Black empowerment and liberation, and a celebration of what beauty comes from Black struggle and endurance. While After The Wake is a continuing, developing, story, about Black rebirth during hard times, Her Story will be a 5 episode miniseries focusing on after the wake while centering Black female voices.”
The 5 episode miniseries ended with their last session on November 28th. The show expects to come back for a second season sometime next year! I’m looking forward to the next Black female voices After The Wake will introduce on their new guest list. I sat down with artist Jah’China De Leon to talk about her work, liberating Black women through how we see ourselves, and what prompted her to create the After The Wake cover art.
There is nothing like feeling empowerment in the work of one’s self, and Jah’China feels the most empowered when it uplifts her peers; men, and women of color. “I feel like things of empowerment lie in just happiness,” she says with her bubbly personality on screen — our conversation was about the emotions she wants to provoke in her art.
Jah’China desires to beautify Black life. She compels her audience to imagine a renaissance of the Black body in renditions of paintings in the era of romantic and baroque art. She creates visual art imagined through the lens of Black representation — romanticism and iconography — a divine nature of superhuman characters, warriors, and angels that elicit nostalgia.
As an experiment with material surfaces, Jah’China reconstructed Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s famous oil painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” The painting is appropriated as a self-portrait illustration, a reflection of culture; as an artist, she self-reflects when she taps into her ancestral roots. “The culture that is influenced is not African, it’s Black culture; there’s a significant difference when a lot of artists focus on the Black body. The generic link to that is Africa, mother Africa’. I am using Black culture, which is especially different from other places,” she explains.
It later became a tangible fabric design, materialized into a large blanket, woven together on a weaving machine. The tapestry was featured during her residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The foundation is a supportive art collective organized by female art practitioners. They provide the necessary tools and space for an art community to learn, experiment and navigate the art business.
The Black culture that Jah’China strives to depict is not the one found on BET but in the heart of her family and friends. Growing up in Far Rockaway, Brooklyn New York, played an instrumental role in nurturing Jah’China’s creativity as an artist. Jah’China found inspiration from her uncle’s comic book drawings, — marvel comics — she describes it as “hyper-realistic” and “cartoon-like all in one.” A common characteristic seen in her artwork is hereditary. “People do claim to see my face in it, which I always find funny because they always say that an artist’s face can be found in their work,” Jah’China admits. Her background inherits three Caribbean lineages “although they are not super present in my work they hold a place in each detail,” on her mother’s side, Jamaican and Guyanese, and her father is Panamanian.
Her first independent art show was in the Bronx at DreamYard. A round oil painting of a Black woman’s face, on an oval cut slab of foam board, surface, — her face fills the frame, encompassed by an aura of flowers. Her hair is tied up with an afro-centric headband; her curly bangs frame her face. Her eyelids are glossy, and so are her eyes and lips, and her skin is vitiligo. The painting was sold three years ago to a young Black woman who customized it as a vanity mirror with round light bulbs.
Jah’China De Leon’s artwork finds a place in the Black community’s pride. It embraces the Black body with fantasy, imagining “Black life beautifully presented and glorified,” she states. This is an idea of how she approaches her art by expressing sexuality, power, and spirituality. Jah’China’s work illustrates Black imagery that is underrepresented in the genre of illustration. I asked Jah’China, how have illustrations evolved in Black communities? Her response was, “Black art and Black businesses are being heard more. We are seeing all these Black illustrators come to light, a lot of people that weren’t of color were illustrating and getting props for it,” Jah’China says. The artist identifies as @sunny_mind_state on Instagram. Graphic designers and illustrators showed solidarity to support charities and funds for the Black Lives Matter movement in the mainstream. She shares social media links and resources, including articles and slides that non-people of color can use to educate themselves.
Enlarging her work digitally or by hand was challenging to grasp, with a professor’s idea to claim and embrace space. With the significance of height and stature, the figures dominate space and can be used to transport her audience, on a spiritual level.”It is bigger than life; you have to work with that.” Dimension became her friend when enlarging one of her artworks, “Gutter Flume.”
“Gutter Flume” illustrates two women standing over one another. One woman is in a long dark green dress with feathers printed, and she is pouring a vase of water over the head of the woman naked below her. They are entwined by their hair-like vines. The woman below has her head down, eyes closed, accepting the growth and life that’s flourishing. In Jah’China’s room, a blue wall with plants and vines hanging between a long vertical print — on polyester fabric. She says the title is a conjunction of two words; gutter reminds her of the term sometimes used to construe the hood, Flume means to surge water, “we are filled with water, it keeps us going without us knowing, it is one of the magical properties of this world,” she claims.
This Summer 2020, the After The Wake team reached out to have cover art made for their podcast about telling stories concerning struggles that lead to peace, positivity, and liberation. De Leon reflects on the process saying, “I was working on trying to make an image that was fragmented or disrupted… Then I thought about what happens after you go through a moment where everything is frazzled and disrupted? You kind of come back together and you’re different from who you were the first time.” You come back from being broken better than you were before and that’s what Jah’china’s cover art displayed.
Jah’China is no stranger to the “after the wake moment.” She says after living with a problematic family, “it all bubbled up and I decided I was going to leave that behind and kind of step into my independence, I guess that was my moment…” Her cover art and her body of work on a whole connect to the character she created, “After the wake, after me realizing, and me leaving, everything has just been going a lot more uphill since then, I took that negative lifestyle, I left it, and I grew above it. Which is what basically my illustration shows… it’s her growing above all… Which is why she’s in the clouds.”
De Leon is inspired to explore the three-dimensional art realm of sculptural installations and set design. The world of her art can expand physically; this is the foundation of her thesis. She wants her artwork as a visual piece or as an ad in the subway stations, MTA bus stops, — anywhere in everyday life. She wants people to find her art in ordinary places — wherever it makes a statement in scale and size.
Streaming on Anchor and Spotify.
DONATE:
