'I don't want it to be the norm': Louisville artist paints to bring attention to violence

Jaylin Stewart’s brushstrokes have such a way of bringing paintings to life that you’d never know so many of her subjects are dead. 

But buried beneath the bright colors and vibrant technique lies the 23-year-old artist’s grief. It’s a pain that dates back a decade to her cousin's murder near Shawnee Park, and it grew as more people she loved went into the ground.

Today, the Louisville native is an artist and activist who uses her art to speak out about the gun violence that plagues both her city and the country. 

But back when her cousin was killed, she was a kid with a paintbrush and a broken heart.

What started as an art class project at Butler High School has evolved into a mission to use art to heal her community. Her close friend was murdered her sophomore year, and she painted him in art class. She'd always loved portraits, but watching him take form on the canvas in front of her was therapeutic. 

Gun violence, poverty, illness and drugs were prominent near Victory Park where she grew up. This year alone there have been at least 28 homicides in west Louisville, according to information from the Louisville Metro Police Department.

A number like that isn't just a statistic to Stewart. Those aren't just homicides. Those are family members, friends, and neighbors. People. 

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She calls the work she does in her studio space “pain and healing,” and she uses her art to honor lives lost and the people working to lift up her community. She even runs a nonprofit art school that teaches artistic therapy to others struggling with pain and loss. 

Death isn't pretty, and while her paintings captivate her audience, it's not supposed to be pretty, she said. It's supposed to help people see something most don't want to see.

“I don’t come from beautiful scenery, I come from Victory Park,” the west Louisville resident said. “I’ve grown up, and I’ve hung out in all kinds of neighborhoods, and there ain’t nothing beautiful about them besides the people and their spirits and their souls.”

Those spirits and souls helped her as she lost people she loved, dropped out of high school and worked her way into the local art scene. 

Her love for her neighborhood is real, but with it comes a painful reality. People die in the streets at a rate no teenager should have to grieve.

When she paints the victims, you can see the humanity in their eyes. And you can see the determination in her own to stop the violence. 

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'I don't want it to be the norm'

If you stand in her studio at the old Shawnee High School, you can see her memories preserved in paint. She imagines her subjects how they were when they were alive.

One is smiling.

One looks tough.

Another sports a big grin. “He was a player,” she says. 

Her cousin's death was the first murder that hit her family closely. Her mother and grandmothers shielded her from the trouble in her neighborhood as much as they could, but she lost at least one person she knew well to violence every school year, starting with her cousin.

“I was losing so many people that it almost became normal to me,” she said. “I don’t want it to be the norm for my life, and I don’t want it to be the norm for other people’s lives.”

Hearing her list the way death followed her through high school feels like reading an obituary page. Instead of going to her first day of school her senior year, she went to her cousin’s funeral.

The losses changed her. She cried a lot. She chopped off her hair. She lost weight.

And then she put that grief into her art, and everything changed.

Sometimes she paints people she knew, and sometimes she paints people she doesn’t, but she calls them all "her people."

Several of them have been killed, but she's lost people she loves to illness too. Grief knows no boundaries, so her work doesn’t either.

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She never met rapper Nipsey Hussle, but she was devastated when he was murdered earlier this year in Los Angeles. She ties his "Victory Lap" album to her own experience in Victory Park, and she grieved his murder as though she grew up with him — and really, through his music, she had. 

When she doesn't know a subject well, she'll use their family's stories and photos as inspiration. 

Shaunta' Miller-Crumes, who lives in the California area, has known Stewart since she was a little girl with a sketchbook. When her brother died of a heart attack three years ago, Miller-Crumes' daughter asked Stewart to paint a portrait of him.

Her brother was energetic and outgoing. He always kept a smile on his face, and that was the first thing Miller-Crumes noticed about the commissioned work — his big, bold grin.

“I looked at it and held the picture to my heart and tears just started flowing; he’s just always going to be here with me,” Miller-Crumes said.

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'God Rest America'

Days after the El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, mass shootings, Stewart sat in her small gallery space in Old Louisville with blue and red lights flickering around her and $100 bills, heroin needles, shoes and stuffed animals scattered at her feet.

A tattered American flag and a few handguns sat in the center of a memorial she calls “God Rest America.” The two sides mirror each other but one half is blue and the other is red. Blue bananas, vodka bottles and flowers rested on the left with their red twins to the right.   

The installation is an artistic version of the memorials Stewart grew up seeing at shooting sites in Victory Park and around the West End.

Her work shows the street’s divide with gang violence, our nation’s divide in politics and the dangers that come with those splits. 

To many, Old Louisville feels like the middle of the city, said Julie Leidner, who curates the small Sheherazade gallery space at 1401 S. Third St. But it's not uncommon for people in west Louisville to think of that area as downtown or east — and vice versa. 

It's a good place to tell the story of a divide.

"I feel like she has something really important to say, and especially what she’s doing with the message behind the colors, it feels very relevant to right now," Leidner said. 

Stewart has a modest following locally, but she's eager to take her message of healing to a national level, and her exhibit at the Sheherazade gallery space may help with that goal.

And while she doesn’t think of herself as an activist, she’s won numerous awards that say otherwise. But that’s not what she set out to be.

Over the next several weeks "God Rest America" is going to slowly take over the small gallery space that's visible 24/7 from behind a clear garage door. She'll add to it as time passes by just as people add to memorials for homicide victims. 

She hadn’t planned the piece to speak to the deaths in El Paso and Dayton, but the narrative around gun violence keeps churning. She’d brought the telephone pole into the gallery for the installation well before 31 people died in those cities, but her mission of using art to heal goes beyond her own neighborhood. 

She grew up in a place where killings felt normal. She believes our country is starting to feel that way, too.

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'You can make it from here … we did'

Even though her art is inspired by loss and grief, there's still so much hope in her work. 

While she never imagined graduating from high school, she always knew she'd go to art school. She just needed to do it in her own way and time. 

It's been about six years since she dropped out of high school, but she's back in the classroom now. She teaches art at the West End Boys School, and she's received a full-ride scholarship to the Kentucky College of Art and Design to pursue her career. She's held several art shows, and she told her story to a crowd last year during Louisville's Creative Mornings lecture series. 

She knows what's possible once you break out of a cycle of despair. Some of the best examples of that are outside of her own brushstrokes. 

She has six portraits in her studio she didn’t paint — Councilwoman Jessica Green; former WHAS reporter Renee Murphy; Ricky Jones, chair of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville and a Courier Journal columnist; Diane Porter, the first African American woman to head the Jefferson County Board of Education; Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League; and John Marshall with Jefferson County Public Schools. 

They’re all successful black people in Louisville, and they were painted by children as part of her Adah School of Art, a nonprofit she started to help others use art as therapy. 

She drew out the portraits, and then she had her kids paint in the faces. They spent weeks researching those local leaders and getting the expressions just right.

And while those faces took form on the canvas, a new confidence among the students did too.

“I’m not easy on them because life is not going to be easy,” Stewart said.

With a lot of hard work, they can create something they're proud of.

She wants kids in her neighborhood to hear that message every day, so she’s left inspiration for them at Shawnee Middle School. She painted a mural there that says “You can make it from here … we did.”

With that same vibrant touch that painted Hussle, Stewart brought to life Muhammad Ali, Ed Hamilton, Alice Houston, Diane Porter and Elmer Lucille Allen.

They’re Louisville legends. They made it.

Then in the center of the mural, she left a mirror, so the kids can see themselves making it — just like she did — too.

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Reach Maggie Menderski at 502-582-7137 or mmenderski@courier-journal.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MaggieMenderski. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/maggiem.