Jackie Milad

Milad mentions the word ‘chaos’ to describe her upbringing and the same can be said about her art, but in the most positive sense; it’s a beautiful chaos and a feast for the eyes. Milad’s tapestries are like layered portals taking the viewer to another world — her personal world; a depository for bits and pieces of what interests her.  Her 2021 mixed-media work “Nada Que Decir” is a typical example. In English, its name means ‘nothing to say.’ However, it seems there is a lot to be said, but perhaps when words fail, pictures can do the talking.

Artblog contributor Susan Isaacs interviews Jackie Milad, an Egyptian-Honduran American artist, curator, mother, and arts administrator. The conversation covers the difficulty of balancing life, work, and art; Jackie's artistic process; and pressures she has felt- e.g. cognitive dissonance about making art about identity. Jackie has a number of current and upcoming shows, which you can read about in this post.

A hand-dyed, pink-tinted canvas pinned to the wall, ripped at its center like an aging bedsheet lying out on the lawn to dry, provides the ground for Jackie Milad’s recent painting “Gold Bars” (2020). Bright yellow fringe gives shade to a smattering of snake-like lines, evil eyes, emojis, text, and patterns that scatter and accumulate like dust across the work and peer out from under layers of overpainting and rosy thread. Offering a cluster of different processes of mark and labor, “Gold Bars” gathers a variety of multidisciplinary moves into one totality, like the practice of musical sampling mobilized for visual means.

JACKIE MILAD thinks of her layered, mixed media works as time-based art. She employs layering as a strategy to protect, hide and transform recurring symbols like eye, snake, brick wall, and breast. She cuts and draws and paints and sews, cannibalizing previously-exhibited works to make new works. A part of one piece becomes the beginning of another. This ongoing, ever-evolving process of creation refuses the notion of artworks as static, archival objects. 

As a collective, we wanted to take time to hightlight those that are doing the hard work of pursuing their own creative and academic goals. While also paving the way to further the representation of marginalized people in the arts and humanities. We have called this series, Taking Our Seat, for our current feature. We sat down with artist, Jackie Milad.