JESSICA VALORIS
Jessica Valoris is an interdisciplinary artist and community facilitator based in Washington, DC. She weaves together mixed media painting, installation, ritual performance, and social practice, to create sacred spaces. Her art activates ancestral wisdom, personal reflection, and community study. Inspired by the earth-based traditions of her Black American and Jewish ancestry, Valoris engages metaphysics, spirituality, and Afrofuturism in her work. Her art is both balm and blueprint: mapping out pathways for the Black liberatory imagination and reviving recipes for collective care. Valoris collaborates with organizers and cultural workers to facilitate community rituals of remembrance and conversations about reparations, abolition, earth stewardship, and more. Valoris is currently a Culture and Narrative Fellow with The Opportunity Agenda and a recipient of the Washington Award from S&R Evermay. She has completed fellowships with VisArts Studio Fellowship, Public Interest Design Lab, Intercultural Leadership Institute, and Halcyon Arts Lab. Iterations of her recent body of work, Black Fugitive Folklore, have been shown at the Phillips Collection, The Kreeger Museum, Africana Film Festival, The REACH at the Kennedy Center, VisArts, and Brentwood Arts Exchange.
Ode to Zipporah, 2021
Single Channel video
5:55 min
“Ode to Zipporah” is a ritual performance that was created through a collaborative process, engaging an intergenerational group of four Black women and a Black girl. This project pays tribute to the history of resistance and the ways that Black women have embodied liberation, even while navigating captivity.
“Ode to Zipporah” centers the liberatory practices built by Black women under the violence of chattel slavery. Black women were integral to the legacy of fugitivity: procuring supplies, harboring fugitives, delivering provisions, providing intel, and supporting other forms of resistance. These practices were woven into their daily lives, though escape was much harder for Black women than their male counterparts. Ode to Zipporah honors Zipporah, Moses’s wife, and centers her as an archetype for Black women who are the doulas of liberation.
Ode to Zipporah was created collaboratively with Laquesha Barnes, Camille Douglass, Dyonnia Hill, Ayesha Ali, and filmmaker Blak Dawn.
Lost and Found: For Jess and Josemin, 2023
Lost and Found: The Imagined, 2023
Calico, ink, wood, embroidery thread, burlap, and pokeberry ink
Each lost and found poem is excavated from the text of fugitive slave ads published in Montgomery County, MD. The text from these documents is ruptured and reconstructed into a love poem, dedicated to the person the original document targeted. The names of each self-liberating ancestor can be found on suspended pieces of burlap and calico. They include Anne Maria Weems, Rachel Davis, Caroline Landick, Jess and Josemin, Daniel Jackson, Peter Reader, Colin Brooks, Joe Carroll, Tobias Martin, and Davy. The Black poem references a slave insurrection that took place a few miles north of Rockville, MD in 1845. The ancestors involved in that armed resistance include Manuel Beall, Carbell, Jesse Dodson, Lemon, Ferdinand, James, Samuel, David, David, James, Mark, Jas. Gray, Lewis Key, and Henry. The insurrection was led by Mark Caesar and William Wheeler.
Opening Series:
Loopholes of Retreat, 2022
Under the Night, 2022
Small fires and after, 2021
Of stars and seeds, 2021
Mixed media door sculptures: Paper, canvas, found objects, acrylic paint, modeling past, raffia, burlap, oyster shells, wood, cardboard
Inspired by the hush harbor, the sukkah, and earthfast structures that freed Black folks built post-emancipation, “Openings” are abstract representations of various fugitive cartographies. Each “Opening” is a meditation on sites and spaces, both physical and imagined, of the night sky, the woods, the horizon, the waterways, the truckpatch, the kitchen, and more. During slavery and post-emancipation, Black folks created spaces of refuge, revival, and return. Spaces both interior and wild, both cosmic, and familiar. Spaces of hiding and harboring, spaces of healing and sustenance, and spaces of expression and story. Using natural materials, discarded and repurposed scraps, Openings are a meditations on fugitive space-making.
“Loopholes of Retreat”: Loophole of retreat is a phrase used by Harriet Jacobs to refer to her hiding place, a small crawl space above her grandmother's cabin where she hid for 7 years after escaping her enslaver. She speaks of this space as one of both confinement and freedom. While here enslaver searched far and wide for her, she hid herself away, on the plantation.
“Under the Night”: After long days of laboring on tobacco farms, enslaved people in the Chesapeake region tended to their personal and familial needs at night. Foraging, fishing, preparing food, washing clothes, caring for children, tending to the truck patch, having secret dance parties and spiritual gatherings, were all practices of collective care that happened under the night sky.
“Small fires and after”: Petit marronage is a practice where Black people escaped to the woods temporarily, stealing away their time and labor. The artist uses the remnants of daily rituals and found objects from nature walks to archive a contemporary practice of refuge and revival. Small micropaintings on each door represent the spaces we carve out of scarred landscapes.
“Of stars and seeds”: A reflection on undergrounds and the nighttime. For fugitives; constellations, plants, and waterways provided resources for navigation, assembly, hiding, nourishment, defense, and spiritual protection. Many Black people nourished a connection to the ground, the sky, and the in-between. Oyster shells represent ancestral presence and divine guidance.