Jennifer Mack-Watkins’ work is rooted in historical research, from W.E.B. Du Bois’ Brownies’ Books to the life of American storyteller and poet, Daisy Turner. But Mack-Watkins doesn’t remain fixed in the past, instead her work is very much focused on the future. She explores themes ranging from space exploration to the unearthing of historical figures like Elijah Pierce.

As an artist, parent, and educator, Mack-Watkins is deeply concerned with the representation of Black children and creating a universe where they are at the center of it. Combining screen printing and mokuhanga techniques, she uses imagery from the past and reinserts it into the context of the Space Age.

Jennifer Mack-Watkins: I wanted to put the moon behind the black child to represent the future, and kind of icon-ize it.

Jon Witzky: Thinking about icons, you were talking about seeing the Warhol and Basquiat shows this summer…

JMW: I went to New York in July because I was a featured artist for the Schomburg Literature Festival - they used my work for banners, and to promote literacy; it was pretty cool to see my art like that — but while I was up there, I went to see the Andy Warhol exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. It showed the influence of his religion growing up, his background — it even had pictures that he and his mom did together, because she was an artist too. I’ve seen so many Andy Warhol exhibitions in New York, but that one was really groundbreaking for me.

And I saw the Basquiat show — I purposely wanted to see them at the same time on that trip. That was King Pleasure, the one that’s kind of at the bottom of some building in Chelsea. It was organized by his sisters. They basically took his living room and put it in the gallery — and these photographs of him as a child — they had voices from his family talking about him, and they had his sketchbooks from high school.

Emily Earl: [looking through Mack-Watkins’ flat file] I mean the scale of these, and the repetition — and the tones that you’re getting are so beautiful.

JMW: Yeah, I think — it’s just a little bit of black, but I want to add more glimmer, like a shimmer. I have a place I like to get all my pigments from in New York, and they have all types of iridescents, and straight pigment, and just like glittery colors… you know, but I want to put even more of a glitter iridescent into the black, like a charcoal black.

EE: What's happening here?

JMW: This is a photograph I took when I was in grad school at Pratt. This is the subway walls. So I just made it into two-toned colors: light blue in the back and then the pixelation of the photograph — they keep painting the subway walls over and over… it bubbles as it dries. I did a whole series of that when I was in grad school but I did it and then I tore it, so these are things I did the second time. The first time I did it in grad school I did one color, but then once I got a show in Chelsea, then I started to do different tones and colors I saw in New York. This is the brick subway wall, and I kind of re-interpreted — these are graffiti — a torn poster, Marilyn Monroe, and this is a photograph I took and then I pixelated it, and printed that. I tear them to make installations: rip them up and then put them back together: like a map kind of structure. Utopic Excavations, that was my thesis show.

JW: I love Andy Warhol now, but it’s taken me a really long time to get to a place where I understand him — you’ve brought him up with me several times in the past — what is your interest?

JMW: Mm, I think he’s just another white man that gets publicity for what he did, right? But I feel like he was important because he took pop culture and things that were important to him or things people would see, and then he made a name for himself. Now we have people who are mixing media and materials, mixing silkscreen with painting and all kind of stuff, so we don’t always have to look at Warhol but — I mean that’s the kind of foundation we can look at – but I think if I could choose between Basquiat and Warhol, it’d be Basquiat.

I feel like he had his own language. Warhol was taking what he saw and replicating it, you know, changing the color a little bit, but as you see his shows so many times — he changes the background, changes a little line here, change the halftone like that, change the color — but when you see Basquiat, I feel like Basquiat definitely developed his own language and being able to communicate with just simple symbols and colors and line and imagery, you know?

JW: Thinking about your creations — and I was kind of looking through the Children of the Sun exhibit and thinking about all of the layers of depth and complexity that’s behind these deceptively, simple images. So in a sense, I feel like you are creating a different type of symbolic language.

JMW: It’s definitely a language. I mean for a long time, I thought I would never put children into my work. It was this whole thing of, you know, you can’t be an artist and be a mom. People ask so much of you: “Can you come here?” “Can you do this here?” And I’m like, “Do you have childcare? Do you have someone who can watch my daughter or son when they’re in the crowd listening to my artist talk?” I feel like we’ve come a long way, because now there’s residencies and places you can go where they have camps for your children or they give you stipends for someone to come take care of them. So I feel like it’s a lot better than what it was. And it wasn’t really talked about when we were in grad school — like, go be an artist, but what if you want to have a family?

JW: Your work feels so much to me about family and about your interest in making sure that the younger generations are going to be heard and seen.

JMW: Yeah definitely — I’m glad you noticed that. I taught for 15 years, I taught K thru 10th grade - 6 years in Harlem, a year in Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, and then two or three years in Atlanta. I was at the Gallery School as a Teaching Assistant, a really prestigious private school in Atlanta. I did that for two years and then I got my first job teaching art after that. I definitely learned a lot within that time, but I feel like it’s all coming back around to me creating with my children and I’m even talking to my daughter about it — she’s making me these drawings, and so I want to try to figure out how to incorporate her drawings in some of my pieces. I told her every day I’m going to have her draw in the sketchbook, that she can just draw and I’ll scan, make it bigger and incorporate it. So I give her prompts like, “Draw me something about space and danger,” “Draw what you think directions in space are.” And so I won’t use everything, but she’s making her own symbols — and trying to understand what those symbols are to her. And my son, he’s 2 — he won “Best Artist” in preschool.

JW: Sweet.

JMW: And my husband’s an artist too. So I mean, we do nothing but draw. We really embrace creativity. I think this new body of work will be more of - Ok, when you get into space, how do you navigate? You know, this world is hard to navigate, but if you go to space, how would you navigate that? What would you find? What would you collect? What would you see and how would you document your time there, before you come back to earth?

JW: Yeah — so you’re really exploring the theme of space in your new work.

JMW: Yeah, and I don’t even know how I got there, but I know the first piece that incorporated the space theme was back in 2019, I have outer space in the background through this window here.

JW: [looking at Jennifer’s new piece featuring a giant, vintage doll head in the center of the page, like the sun, surrounded by concentric circles with a smaller doll head in the position of the earth] So you’re delving deeper into this science and space and —

JMW: Yes, there’s gonna be more. There will be eight — since there are eight planets, right? So, I’m gonna make more rings and it’ll have eight heads around it – eight rings and eight different heads orbiting around the Black child as the center of the universe. Or it could be the sun — however you want to interpret it. But that’s kind of how the study started here.

JW: You were talking about Daisy Turner and the kind of research that you did to find her. She’s so amazing, because she found her voice very publicly, I feel like. There is such a strong connection, now that I know that story and I see your work, I feel this tight bond.

JMW: There’s so many people who use play and Black dolls in their work in different ways, and so I feel like if I hadn’t researched Daisy Turner I probably wouldn’t even have come to this. I don’t even know where I would be. But I’m glad that I’m here, because that was the central part of her story, how she stood up for herself living in Vermont in the 1800s — not many Black families there. I’m sure everyone treated her nicely, but if she was a rebellious and well-spoken person, she probably wasn’t a person you wanted to mess around with. I’ve seen photographs where she had a shotgun because her dad had a hunting lodge where hunters could stay for the winter. She seemed like she was a really tough cookie. If you come to her, you better come correct, you know?

(Laughter)

JMW: She was really tough. Her poem at a young age that she was able to recite at an older age really spoke to who she was as a person.

JW: Is that poem available?

JMW: Well, I got a chance to meet Jane Beck, the author who wrote the book about Turner’s life. She was the head of the Vermont Folklife Center. She’s a dear, sweet lady, and sharp as a tack. I kept seeing the Folklife Center come up in my research, so I contacted them. They gave me audio, they gave me photographs, They gave me contacts — and that’s how I got in touch with Jane who recorded Mary Turner’s voice to make the story. She talked about how she had to develop a relationship with Daisy, because Daisy wasn’t going to just talk… people had to keep going back repeatedly in order for her to trust them, for her to even get a recording. She did a good job documenting her life, because if she hadn’t done that, I don’t know whether people would know about who she is.

JW: Her story is amazing, and her father sounds like he was amazing too.

JMW: Yeah, he was a rebel, I mean he escaped slavery, and he kept running with other slaves and formed a kind of revolt, and then he ended up in Vermont. He had a lot of skills — he built the homestead on top of the hill in Grafton. So part of the show that I had in Vermont at the Brattleboro Museum incorporated Mary Turner’s voice in the exhibition. And my friend who is a poet in Newark made a new rendition of the poem, so you can hear her poem inspired by Turner.

JW: Tell me a bit about this mokuhanga technique that you use.

JMW: I learned mokuhanga from two Japanese artists. Before mokuhanga, I studied relief printmaking. I went to Morris Brown, which is a Historically Black College University — but my printmaking classes were at Clark Atlanta and Atlanta University Center. There was a relationship between the different schools, Clark Atlanta, Atlanta University Center, and Morris Brown, at the time. And so I was able to take classes and cross-register to any school that I wanted to go to, it was a great time.

I had professors like Dr. Ransaw who talked about the Black narrative, and telling a story - not just having a single image, but to have different things going on to narrate a story. There were a lot of amazing murals on that campus — the cafeteria had a mural that told the story from Egypt to slavery, the trials and tribulations — and then showed where we are now, the past, present and future. You know, we saw that as we would go into buildings, our professor would paint those for us to remind us and teach us. So the murals are there to look beautiful, but also to educate us about our history. And it was like, you knew where you came from — you’d always see that Egyptian painting in the lunchroom, you know, and that was your professor that was teaching you.

So I feel like printmaking definitely came from the Clark Atlanta teachers. Christopher Hickey — He taught me how to use lino — it was like the cheapest — not even mounted sometimes. Sometimes I had to make my own. You know, take the flat battleship gray and glue it to the wood, press it, wait for it to dry. So I would carve on just about anything. I also went to Pratt, where I had great teachers like Dennis McNett – he’d take prints and make three-dimensional sculptures or he’d transform a room with his prints. Prints not just in the matrix of a square, but seeing a print transform — having teachers who pushed the boundaries of what the medium can do. I think that’s important. So, you know, going to school, some people don’t think you should go to school or whatever, but I think you go to see how people use materials, and to network and form relationships, because you never know if they need you or you need them, and I think that’s kind of what happens if you decide to go to grad school. You don’t have to, but that’s the route that I decided to go.

JW: I feel like you’ve taken that idea of storytelling that you learned at Brown, and now you’ve continued to express it. And now you’re looking at — there’s stories of the past, but looking into the future -

JMW: Yeah, I’m excited! I’m excited to see where it continues to take me.

JW: Can you talk a little bit about your initial interest in the Brownies’ Books?

JMW: Yeah, so basically W.E.B. Du Bois had a series of books, the Brownies’ Books, that had puzzles, things that were happening socially in the community, and also photographs that people would send in of their children. It would say, “This is such-and-such from California.” And it would be a way to kind of highlight and encourage — say, “This is a child that looks like you,” or “This child is older, they’re about to graduate.” So it would kind of help encourage children throughout those times. Because lynchings were happening, riots were happening, you know, so you had to continue to put all the representation, and not just representation of a poster of someone who had passed away because someone decided to do something to them because of the color of their skin. You had to continue to find positive representation. There weren’t even really books, positive books, that had any representation. It wasn’t easy to even publish it. So you had to find ways to positively represent children. I feel like that was interesting because the doll kind of came into play with Daisy Turner — but then with the Brownies’ Books, I started to be interested in the impact of children and the voice that they have. So I looked at the Children’s March in Alabama, there were children dressed in white, marching, and I thought, “Oh, this is a cute little picture, children dressed in white” — but then as I read and researched, I learned that the picture is about a response to a lynching that happened. It was a protest against that.

There was a really big march that happened in New York, and that was one of the first photographs that W.E.B. Du Bois put in the publication. So it wasn’t just like, “Look at the children, they’re pretty,” but it was also like “Look at this, it’s happening. We can still endure, we can still progress. But this protest is happening. You have the voice to do that and to make a change.” And so all of that was in these books — I’m interested in children’s voices, and their roles in history. And still today, children use their voices to protest and their bodies to make a change — from school shootings, to Black Lives Matter, to LGBTQ+, you can go on and on. But children are at the forefront of these uncomfortable situations, you know?

JW: You’re a teacher. I’m always interested in teaching artists, and how they do what they do, what their viewpoint is.

JMW: When I was at Pratt, I got a job as a Teacher Assistant for a Saturday art school. So they brought people from the community. It’d be like a Mommy & Me, or portfolio building — so I got a chance to see the community and be involved in the art school. And then, I was still in grad school and I found out somehow that the Brooklyn Museum was looking for a teaching artist to do the gallery/studio program, so I applied for that. At that time, I was full-time at Pratt, working at Utrecht in Chelsea between taking classes, and then I work-studied in the print department, you know, cleaning up, picking up shop rags and pouring smelly stuff into the containers. So I always had a lot of different jobs, it’s nice now just to do one or two things. But I think it’s a good skill to have [teaching], because I think you want to just be able to pass down why it’s important to be an artist, technical inspiration, motivation. When I was growing up, I didn’t have any Black art teachers at all. I probably had, maybe two Black teachers the whole time I was in South Carolina. And I was like, “I have to go to a Black school. I need to find out” — who I was, you know? I was like, “I need to see myself, if I’m going to be this artist.” So then I was like, “I’m going to a Black school. I have to do that.” But then I also went to Tufts in Boston. So after I finished there, I was like, “I want to be a teacher.” Then I got a Masters in Art Education. You Gotta Meet Mr. Pierce is going to come out in January, and the pre-order starts in October, so very soon people will be able to see it. Penguin Random House published me, and I’m really excited about that. I’m an illustrator, I can do workshops, I can do lectures — and now I’m becoming more aware of other skills I can add as an entrepreneur. So, all that to say: If you’re an artist, you have to be able to interpret the importance of why you’re here and why it’s important to embrace the arts.

JW: So you’ve got this book coming out — super exciting, and it’s about Elijah Pierce, an incredible artist who lived in my hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Tell me a little about how that came together.

JMW: Super cool. I mean, he’s an amazing sculptor. He would make these super complex scenes, using relief and sculpture. So Penguin Random House found my prints somehow, and came to me and said, “We want you to do this book.” So I looked at the manuscript, and I was like, “Ah, a barbershop!”… I don’t show men in my work, and so I had to research, “Ok, what does the hairline look like, how does the face look different from a female’s? It can’t have curves, it has to look like this…”

I’m really into storytelling and history. I had to do a lot of research for that book. From the barbershop I was able to find the filmmakers that documented him when he was alive, so I took that to kind of see what the barbershop looked like, so I could study his character and what he wore. And then from there, we did a phone call during Covid and they shared the archive with me, photographs of him and things in his shop — they gave me everything. They helped me make it similar to his barbershop. Because the barbershop was for cutting hair, but also it was his gallery. You walk in and all his work’s on display.

JW: Where was that at?

JMW: Somewhere in downtown Columbus, OH. They just knocked down the whole barbershop. It’s no longer there.

EE: How long were you working on that project?

JMW: That was about a year and a half. It was my first time doing a book, and I had two children at the time — and then I was working full-time as a teacher. So it took me about a year and a half to get everything done. It’s about 30 woodblocks, and I did collage, watercolor and mixed media.

JW: I’m so excited about that. We‘ve talked about Du Bois’ Brownies’ Books and the importance of the representation of Black children… Do you have anything you want to say about the representation of Black children? Because I feel like you are working in that same tradition.

JMW: I think we’re way ahead of where we were before. When I was working on the Mr. Pierce book, my daughter was like, “Where am I?” And I was like, “Oh, you’re right — let me add you!” (laughs) So I made her a twin, and she’s dancing in the book, and she just loves it. I feel that, in order for me to be able to encourage my children and have them see the importance of being an artist, as a mom — I might not always be able to be there, but they need to know why I’m doing this. Because it’s for them. I’m trying to build a legacy, a way to sustain my family through my practice. And I think, what better way than to put them in my work. Because I feel like if they can’t connect to it, then they can’t say, “Mom’s an artist, she made this book.” So, she knows my profession. You go to work, you come home — they don’t really know what you do. Your mom, your dad, whoever you stayed with, grandma, they went to work — but they didn’t really talk about it. I need to be able to say: “This is important to me, this is important to our family.” That’s why I started adding children into the work. I first added children into my work in 2019. This was not a good scene, but it was children protecting themselves from gun violence under a desk.

I started doing this because it’s what I was going through at that time. I saw images of a nuclear drill, and began researching how the drills have changed — the purpose might have changed a little bit, but it’s still about protecting. In the private schools we’d have to practice, but in Harlem, it was real. You know? There were actually shootings outside. There were actually people running inside for protection. When I was in the private school, I took it so seriously, “We need to practice this as if it’s real, we need to know what to do to protect ourselves.” But in Harlem, sometimes it was real. Sometimes there was an intruder inside the classroom. I remember one time I was teaching — it was not a drill, but an alarm happening, and I was by myself. I locked the door - I was in the basement, so no one ever came and told me it was ok, but I stayed — lights out, under the desk. I didn’t know what was happening — but that day, somebody was really in the building. So for a teacher, it’s really stressful, even teaching during Covid — that was probably the same feeling I had when I was doing those drills.

JW: You’ve got the children hiding under the desks and I’ve seen other works of yours where there’s a target. Even in the piece with the solar system, I think you had expressed it as a target in the past.

JMW: Definitely. Just seeing space as a place to escape, where you don’t have to worry about being protected. You have to make sure you can breathe in your suit or whatever, but it’s a safe place. I use space as a way to encourage thinking about the future and endless possibilities. I got a chance to meet Nikki Giovanni, and that was really cool because she wrote this poem called “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars)” where she was talking about, if African Americans were in space, what would we take, what would we drink when we were there, who would be there with us — it was just like a really jive kind of poem.

JW: You know, this idea of Afrofuturism, it’s very multi-faceted.

JMW: I want people to research Afrofuturism — because there are so many ways you can go. I mean, one of the greatest is Octavia Butler. But I think for me, how I interpret it is just seeing myself in the future, seeing my children in the future. In space, there are no limits, no boundaries, no restrictions, no one can claim it’s theirs - It’s a free place just to be, and to think and to observe the greatness of space without interruptions. You’re just there to observe and look and do whatever you feel.

JW: Yeah, you’re in space, you’re not like, “Oh it’s 7AM, I’ve gotta” —

JMW: — “I’ve gotta be somewhere!” But there’s nowhere to go! You’re just gonna float around. But, I like that. Because we’re always on such a schedule - we need to stop and just observe. I think Covid helped us to stop and slow down. But I think to stop and slow down and look around is kind of how you would be in space; just observing it and wandering through space.

JW: Well I’m so excited for you! You’ve got your hands in all sorts of different amazing things.

JMW: Probably too many!

JW: I understand — I know the feeling! Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

JMW: Thank you! I appreciate that, Jon.

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