Dipped in head-to-toe black and her signature winged eyeliner, artist Jamea Richmond-Edwards holds court; her Kweendom come amid the rush of enthusiastic praise for her solo exhibition of new work, Prom Night. Family, friends, former students, curators, and collectors all spellbound by faces rendered in elegant grayscale engulfed in riotous color and richly layered texture. Ink and paint, fabric and glitter, multi-patterned and marbleized paper, and the occasional doorknocker earring create an elaborate mixed-media fantasia – the unabashed celebration of the pomp and pageantry that is prom night in Black culture. Mylar balloons customized with a silhouetted prom "Kween" hover festively above as Edwards' Detroit homie, DJ Mal rocks the decks, inspiring some folks to do the Hustle. A follower on social media proclaims, "This is the blackest exhibition I've ever been to!" Richmond-Edwards is delighted: "For someone to say that, I've achieved everything I needed to achieve." It's a vibe marked by self-assured girls with commanding gazes, bold fashion, stiletto nails, and fly whips with spinner rims. Their braided beaus meet their undeniable flyness in swaggy splendor. In the centerpiece of the exhibition, Fly Whips and Fly Girls, two young women, serving face and fierce fashion predominate – it is their night. Still, scattered throughout the large scale, four-panel tableau, to moving effect, are houses and neighbors, representing community – the village an intrinsic part of the coming-of-age ritual, to buoy them and see them for the women they are becoming.

It's a heady time in her life. Prom Night just opened at Chelsea's Kravets/Wehby Gallery. The following day, her collaboration with the sold-out Washington, D.C. iteration of Refinery 29's touring, immersive megahit experience, 29Rooms, opened at the D.C. Armory. The fourth book published with her cover art has just been released. On November 7, another solo show, 7 Mile Girls, an ode to the emphatic Blackness of the girls of "The D," opens at the Rowan University Art Gallery in Glassboro, New Jersey. A thirteen-year veteran art instructor, she recently left teaching to pursue her art full time. In addition to her expanding art practice, she and her acupuncturist/herbalist husband, Geoff, are raising three homeschooled sons. And if that wasn't enough, she doubles as "momager" to her first-born, Jeremiah. His virtuosic chops on the double bass have them fielding offers from some of jazz's bright lights.

Commissioned to create the experiential "traveling billboard" installation for the D.C. stop of the 29Rooms: Expand Your Reality Tour, Richmond-Edwards returned to a childhood intrigue – paper dolls – to implement an interactive component. Placed throughout the installation are unembellished doll figures featuring her ink-drawn heads. With a massive mural depicting one of her fly girls as inspiration, guests can explore their creativity to "dress" the dolls with materials provided. "I loved paper dolls as a child; I made my own and so the viewer has the opportunity to collage elements like paper and rhinestones onto the figures – similar to what I do in my studio practice," she says. Though she is admittedly "very protective of my process and my girls," she is pleased to collaborate with 29Rooms and their inclusive space. Her woman-centered work synergizes with Refinery29's women's empowerment mission.

The empowered young women in her work have their genesis in her Detroit family. Women of presence. "My grandmother, how she carried herself, was very regal. She reminded us of Dynasty," Richmond-Edwards says. Raised in the era when crack nearly decimated urban cities, she is deeply proud of her mother and her resilience in the face of adversity and admires her style and sense of self. "My mother and sister, Brandi [13 years her senior], teach me so much. They have such agency in terms of their bodies and how they express themselves. They're a lot louder, and they'll dance at any moment. It used to embarrass me," she admits. "Like be quiet, you don't want people to look, but now I have so much respect." And it informs her work. "The colors, density, music, and agency, I get from them." Her vivacious mother made a living in the motor town at the Chrysler factory, but she indelibly set the aesthetic with her vivid outfits for nights of Detroit bopping. "I realize that is what manifests here," Richmond-Edwards says of the influence on her work.

"One of the things that was a staple in the midwest was 'gators; you know, alligator and crocodile, and of course, a mink coat. So I incorporate the shoes, the texture as an ode to our aesthetics, our Americana aesthetics." She ponders the concept of luxury: "What does it mean? Luxury, for me, is about having agency over your own body and having the agency to move and be free. It's deeper than clothes. I'm looking at my upbringing and the experience of my people from a different lens." Rather than a quest for assimilation, it is an act of rebellion. "How we dress, the flamboyancy of it is the antithesis of Whiteness and conservatism. We've always been masters of code-switching and code-switching in terms of a survival mechanism. I think it's important that we celebrate that people exercise agency over their bodies." 

Agency is a recurrent theme in her work, and in the Prom Night exhibition, she toys with respectability politics. The predictable prom season social media dragging of so-called "ghetto" fashion raises her ire. She exclaimed on Instagram, "if you catch anyone trying to clown these creative children, please defend them." She believes the uniquely Black American prom culture should be given the same rite-of-passage reverence as the Quinceañera celebrations of the Latinx community or the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of Jewish culture.  

Pointing to a photo from her 2000 prom, she says, "I designed my prom gown. That whole customization thing, that's a standard in the Midwest, to design your own prom dress. I designed some for a couple of friends too. If I would have had access to the Gucci pattern/fabric, you best believe this would have been that. We didn't even know what Dapper Dan was doing in New York. It was about not having access to what mainstream deems luxury. But I'ma flip it; design my own and it's probably going to be better than what y'all have. Every time you see Black Americana influences on the runway, you know they watching us!”

The seed planted early; she's drawn since the age of three, her family fostering her talent. Her sister made sure to let her know whenever soft-spoken, curly-permed artist, Bob Ross shared The Joy of Painting on public television. "She'd call 'Me-Me, come, come,' and I would run to the TV. And there was Good Times. I didn't know who Ernie Barnes [painter of the character's artworks] was, I just saw that JJ was an artist." Her mother enrolled her in drawing programs at the local art college and proudly showed her drawings to everyone who would look. Her neighbor, Ms. Kearney suggested that high schooler Jamea meet her daughter Marietta who as the first Black female auto designer, designed the 1982 interiors of the popular Chevrolet Beretta and Corsica cars. "I enrolled in a car design program and met Marietta's mentor." In a spark of coincidence, the mentor was a former dance partner of her mother. On a field trip to Wayne State University, she was first exposed to the work of Renee Cox in a group show at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery. "I was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and I saw The Liberation of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and I was so mesmerized.” Used to the "super Whiteness of the Detroit Institute of Arts, discovering Renee Cox was significant. "It was the first time I saw a Black woman doing art. Even in my formal art education, we never learned about black artists; we just recreated a Picasso or Van Gogh. And this was in Detroit: all Black teachers, all Black. That's why I went into teaching." She set out to balance that equation.

She made a point to attend HBCUs for both undergrad (Jackson State University) and graduate school (Howard). In 2004, she received her B.A. in Art, magna cum laude, moved to her husband's Milwaukee hometown, became a freelance illustrator for the Milwaukee Courier, and gave birth to their first son. She began her teaching career as a Fine Art Instructor to 4th - 8th graders in 2005. "I joined an organization called AAABEA African-American Artists Beginning to Educate Americans about African-American Art and discovered people's masterful mixed media skills." Milwaukee-based folk artist, Della Wells, became a mentor; her influence is evident in Richmond-Edwards' collage technique. "Della Wells is a phenomenon," she says.

After three years, the growing Edwards family moved to the D.C. area, where she taught art (IB-certified) and became department chair at Archbishop Carroll High School. She would also eventually become an instructor for Prince Georges County Public Schools and an adjunct professor of art at American University. She joined Black Artists of D.C. (BADC), an "arts group with a range of artists from novice to Sam Gilliam. It was amazing!" she says. And again, she marveled over the mixed media expertise of her fellows and their openness to mentorship. "They see a young person who is eager; they just take you up under their wings," she says. "I've had a sense of community; people in the black arts community; it's close-knit."

Her various mentors through the years have been invaluable. From AfriCOBRA artist, Murry DePillars, during her Tougaloo Art College residency in 2003, Della Wells in Milwaukee, Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter, co-founder of BADC and Ron Akili Anderson and James Phillips as she pursued an MFA in Painting at Howard. "I would definitely not be where I am if not for their mentorship."

She adds, I went into education super radical, and I felt like I had one of the best art programs in the country, but I wasn't taught the practicality of being an artist. She credits conceptual artist, Felandus Thames for being "very instrumental in terms of career navigation; he helped me a lot. It's not in a vacuum. I think there's this romanticized narrative about the lonesome artist, and that has never been my career. I attribute the success of my career to the collective."

Inspired by AfriCOBRA, she and artist Amber Robles Gordon started an artist's collective, Delusions of Grandeur, with peers, Stan Squirewell, Shaunte Gates, Wesley Clark, and Larry Cook. They exhibit annually. Invited to participate in the PRIZM Art Fair at Art Basel Miami 2018, the group, along with artists Holly Bass and Adrienne Gaither, successfully crowdfunded their travel with a "Bum Rush Art Basel" Indiegogo campaign. Coincidentally, an AfriCOBRA retrospective was mounted at MOCA North Miami during Basel. It was there that Richmond-Edwards saw the direct lineage from the 60s-era collective to the work she creates today.

"All that is part of the influence with the density of the work; with my training at Howard," she says, walking through her early 2019 exhibition, Stay Fly at CulturalDC's Mobile Art Gallery. The exhibition location, in a shipping container, upends the notion of luxury just yards from the luxe shops of CityCenterDC: Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Hermès, to name a few. "I'm an eighties baby," she adds, pointing to a Coogi sweater. "This was big, the dress code of the nineties in Detroit. So now I'm looking at all of this gumbo of influence. This exhibition is a collage of my upbringing through the lens of fashion."

She stares at a triptych of framed collages. "These are really nice," she says, laughing. "I haven't seen them since I dropped them off. Ha! That is so pretentious of me." Smart, engaging, and conscious, pretentious she is not. She loves the spectrum of Black naming conventions, the creativity. She's here for it all. "The Bonquishas, beautiful names," she says, then quotes poet Warsan Shire: "Give your daughters difficult names." The full poem bespeaks pride in identity and culture: 

“give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn't allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right."  Warsan Shire

The young women of Richmond-Edwards' work are unflinching. Would they trust anyone that cannot pronounce their names correctly? Doubtful. Their stoic, yet luminous beauty came to be rendered in ink as a safety measure. Lacking proper ventilation in her home, she sacrificed her preferred medium, oil paint, for the health of her asthmatic children. In so doing, she discovered that "the ink has a permanence and a sense of fluidity that I gravitated towards," an "aesthetic decision" that defined her oeuvre. "There are social implications," she says. These are melanated women, black women. I see these women all the time, but they are not anyone in particular. They favor me a little or the women in my family. I see my grandmother; I see my mother; I see my cousin."

She found catharsis in examining the archetype of the serpent-haired gorgon, Medusa, in her Master's studies. "My body of work in grad school was about that." Her aunt, who struggled with addiction, was murdered in 2007. "They shot her in the back, disrespectful. But Medusa, she was actually a goddess. And to me, my aunt was still the beautiful, charismatic person we'd always known, in spite of whatever battles she had. I was looking at a lot of religious iconography; I grew up Catholic. So that was very therapeutic for me."

The exhibition 30 Americans, from the private Rubell Family Collection, came to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. during her graduate school years. "That was also life-changing for me because it was my first time seeing a museum show exclusively dedicated to Black contemporary artists. I was like Oooh, one day I want to be in this collection. Full circle, and here we are," she laughs. The Rubells acquired four of her works in 2018. (One, Ancestral Matrix and Alligator Boots, 2018 appears below) "They have a new exhibition called New Acquisitions, and I have a room."

She believes in the power of manifesting. "My sister-in-law said you need to write what you want down; she told us about The Secret .I can attest that once I started writing it down, everything has manifested, including purchasing a home with the number of rooms." She mentions author Octavia Butler's prophetic diary. "She manifested. It's so real; it's scary!"

This proud black woman from "The D," once dismissed her grandmother's claim of Native American heritage: "No, Grandma, you don't know what you are talking about." She regrets those words now. "I'd adopted this narrative: we were enslaved; we're from Africa. Sure that's in there somewhere, but it doesn't predominate," she says. In retrospect, she recalls her grandmother's many "peculiar ways" that she'd thought of as weird, such as her reverence for spiders. "She would catch them," she says. "My grandmother was proud of who she was. Now I'm looking at Choctaw cosmology and rituals. I'm looking at it through a different lens, embracing it.” Before, “when I viewed my family or black women in a historical context, I only looked at it as an oppressed voice. But what does it mean to descend from free people? We have a unique style and aesthetic that's strictly American.”

With the help of a genealogist, she "obsessively researched" her family history and learned of her deep roots in the American South–roots that pre-date the United States. She's discovered documentation of her Muscogee/Choctaw lineage dating back to the 17th century. Save for a few who migrated to Oklahoma; her ancestors lived in the same region – today's state of Georgia – for generations. That is until the Great Migration sent many to "the industrial North, an opportunity to become middle class," she says. Her paternal great uncle, however, still lives on the family property, land that her older brother, Nick, suggested that she set foot on. And when she did, it felt like home. "I live here; I'm comfortable here; I love the city," she says of the Washington Metropolitan area. But her ancestral land down south? "That's home. That's my style, my flavor, my attitude: The Dirty South." She adds, "Detroit, I can appreciate for the time that I had there, but there's a lot of pain in that city for me." 

Seven years after her aunt's murder, she lost her brother Farrad in a senseless shooting. "They carjacked him in Detroit; didn't even take anything." She points out a piece called An Ode to Farrad 2, one of ten she saw in a dream. "But I couldn't bring myself to draw him." As she did with the work honoring her aunt, she drew one of her familiar yet unspecific women as an ancestral avatar. "My brother, he loved Coogi, he was about his paper, and he loved Detroit, loved it! Even when we said the city's bad, come here to Maryland, he was like no, iI ain't moving out to the suburbs. I was only able to do two pieces in relationship to him; these pieces had a lot of tears coming out. So I had to back up off it a little bit. But I'll revisit because there were ten in the dream."

Her inquiry into her genealogy has her rethinking everything. She's exploring Native American mound culture, the artifacts contained within, and evidence of "Negroid-featured" people. "Hmmm, this is interesting; this is not something we're typically taught. I didn't learn this in art history, and I studied art for seven years," she says. Nor did she learn in history class of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act of Virginia introduced by racial separatist Walter Plecker to prevent the white race from being "swallowed up by the quagmire of mongrelization." The eugenic hierarchy classified people of purely Caucasian descent as "white," and all others, including those of African descent, indigenous Americans, and mixed-race people, were lumped together in oppression as "colored." Thus effecting a paper genocide of Native Americans and stripping them of land rights. "Whether you're African, indigenous, or Pacific Islander, you've been subjugated in some way – you had your land stolen, or you were stolen from your land. It's been very eye-opening. We have to question everything we've been told. I found a distant cousin in Oklahoma; he was Indian on one census; then colored; then negro. They weren't filling them out themselves. What does Black mean? What does White mean? If we are going to talk about the construct of Blackness, then we have to talk about the construct of Whiteness. It's an invention."

As she delves ever deeper into her heritage, the knowledge of her indigenous roots impacts her work. “My family is from the southeastern parts of the U.S.; Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and North and South Carolina,” she says. “The horned serpent is a recurring motif and historical creature that’s prevalent throughout this region that historically is part of The Mississippian [indigenous mound-building] culture dating back thousands of years.” She began to incorporate the serpent into her work about a year ago. "People are looking to see representation outside of Eurocentrism,” she asserts. I look forward to her explorations of identities outside the dominant, mainstream culture.

Jamea’s TROVE:

1. The Office tv show. Nine hilarious seasons of the dunderheads at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.

2. Prince. The mononymic star’s hit album 1999 dropped the year she was born.

3. Teaching. "I enjoy teaching more than full-time art. It was very hard to leave; I miss it. I taught at an arts school, and if I'm encouraging kids to go into art and I have this opportunity to be a full-time artist, I have to do it for them," she says. "I'm sure I'll go back; probably teach at the collegiate level. That's my heart. I love pedagogy. I love it."

4. The Five Heartbeats. The Robert Townsend-directed chronicle of the rise and fall of an R&B vocal group is one of her favorite films.

5. My grandmother’s dressing recipe. It’s a scrumptious melange of bread, bell peppers, onions, celery, cream of mushroom soup, eggs, cornmeal and flour.

6. Gourmet cookies. She loves them all. “Any kind, to be honest.”

7. Disney’s Moana. What’s not to love.? “A young brown girl saved her island while honoring her heritage and being led by the ancestors.”

8. Duro Olowu. It’s no surprise, given her penchant for pattern play that she’d love the sophisticated designs of the London-based fashion designer; discovering his work was a boon.

9. Spending time with my family. “Just us. Typically laughing at a story someone is telling.”

10. My mother dancing. “My mother is a dancer, a social dancer: in DC, it’s called hand dancing; in Detroit, it’s bopping. Growing up, I would see the weekly ritual of my mother getting dressed in what I called costumes because she went all out!”

The artist statement for the Stay Fly exhibition at the Mobile Art Gallery at CityCenterDC in early 2019 states:

Part of the dancing culture in many urban cities is the opulent dress code, which is quite different from Sunday church attire. Often times, the woman’s dress would match her wig and dance partner’s suit. On special occasions, couples color coordinated their outfits with their cars.

Social dancing was a major pillar in my community and greatly influenced my work. As an aspiring fashion designer throughout high school, I gained inspiration from my mother and the black models in Ebony Fashion Fair who were clad in haute couture.

For Stay Fly, I drew upon my mother’s style and the 90’s aesthetic of my youth. Part of “being seen” was adorning oneself with the luxury brands of the time. - Jamea Richmond-Edwards

Here, her mother, Pamela dances at the opening.