AUGUST 2025 Artist in Residence

Home Country: U.S.A.

Country of Residence: U.S.A.

My name is Natalie Jamilia James and I am a daughter of the rich dark soil of the Alabama Black Belt and the life-giving mountain forests of St. James Parish, Jamaica. I am a narrative journalist, writer, and poet based in the U.S. South. I write about the human condition, Black art and Black culture using personal narrative. My art practice is my writing and I view writing and narrative storytelling as powerful tools for healing and liberation. I am currently working on my first short fiction manuscript unveiling a story of truth-telling, family legacy, relationships with land, ancestral bonds, and spiritual journeying.

Find me on Substack @thesourceoflight 

Home Country: U.S.A

Country of Residence: U.S.A.

My art practice is a spiritual and cultural offering—a visual language shaped by memory, ancestry, and the urgency to witness. I draw from my Yoruba heritage, personal migration story, and the collective experiences of Black and marginalized communities. Through vibrant color palettes, layered surfaces, and symbolic motifs, I navigate the complexities of joy, loss, resilience, and connection.

I work across media; painting, enamel on metal, sculpture, printmaking, and performance, letting the material speak. Some works, like those in my Mystic Series, emerge through intuitive mark-making and abstraction, creating organic forms that echo nature and spirit. Others, like Sacred Imprints, are deeply research-based, invoking ancestral DNA and reimagining narratives tied to slavery, migration, and survival.

As a curator, educator, and cultural bridge-builder, I believe in the power of art to restore dignity, inspire reflection, and build community. My Menopause Art Project and cyanotype workshops create intergenerational dialogue around health and healing, while my recent installation work explores elemental forces as metaphors for transformation.

Art, to me, is both meditation and activism. It is how I remember, resist, and reimagine. It is how I call on my ancestors and listen to the shadows. As I continue this journey, my work aims to resonate beyond borders, igniting empathy, empowering identity, and preserving heritage through every imprint I leave behind.

Home Country: Jamaica.

Country of Residence: U.S.A.

I am working on a novel, My Name Is Sweet Thing, inspired by the Nina Simone 1966 blues song, “Four Women.” The story reimagines an origin story about one of the voices--Sweet Thing, whom we first meet as Clarissa Singh, a ten-year-old girl whose mother dies at the hands of her father.  My work uses folklore and Afro-Caribbean spiritism to explore how it felt for her to be first thrust into a new life in rural St. Catherine with her Aunt Winnifred, her cousins, and her aunt's ward, Solomon, and later in the New Orleans underworld where she assumes the name Sweet Thing. She returns to Prospect after some trouble abroad. I will be working on that question of this return during this residency. 

Home Country: Jamaica.

Country of Residence: Jamaica

As a Black Jamaican textile artist, I interrogate cultural memory, colonial legacies, and ancestral resilience through an intersectional lens of race, gender, and class. My practice deconstructs inherited histories and reweaves them into tactile narratives of resistance and reclamation. 

I work primarily with discarded and found materials such as old clothes and scrap

fabrics, transforming them through Afro-Caribbean textile techniques including weaving, quilting, appliqué, and mola.