Jessica Brown
Media: Performance, Public Art
Jessica Brown is a Interdisciplinary Multimedia Spectacle Generator, Afrofuturist Mermaid Cosmonaut Explorer, Community Builder and Creative Connector creating disruptive & discursive work centered in social justice, diversity and equity. Known around town as Lady J, she’s a visual and performance artist, activist, designer, entertainer, musician, producer, party thrower and world builder — curated and unscripted. She operates through a lens of joy and justice in order to empower, uplift and encourage discourse across audiences. She is fierce and unapologetically Black.
In her work, she uses multiple mediums to create spaces for critical conversations. Relying on nostalgia and pop culture images from her childhood as tools to connect with her audience, Her work “amuses all of the senses” and as a means to educate and inform. She offers “layers of engagement” as a way for audience members to engage and interact with the work on their own terms.
An Associate Professor of Industrial Design at Rhode Island of Design, she uses a liberatory design framework, creating flexible environments that facilitate safe and inclusive space for all people to explore, investigate, reflect, & discuss intersectional topics of race, class, gender, environment, politics and human rights through the lens of her own lived experience as a Black Woman of African American Heritage living and thriving in the US.
Within the Providence community she is very active. A recent member of the 4 year commission, African American Ambassadors Group to advance the progress of her people on the path to Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations; former board member of the Providence municipal Reparations Commission, founding board member and artist at the Nicolson File Art Studios now Studio 50 (sims), board member of PRONK! the Providence Honk Festival of bands and community activists, member of the Haus of Glitter, and founder of Optimistic People Project!, OPP! And FLOAT! a water-based restoration practices for Black Women and Women of Color. She is the Creative Principle of her Design Production Company Lady J Productions.
If you can’t get a hold of her, she’s probably floating somewhere out on the water, being still and restoring her soul.
https://www.theladyjbrown.com/
