Salon Nights: Art Workshop with Jessica Valoris

Join us to create mixed media mezuzot during our Inside Outside In-Between workshop, led by Jessica Valoris. Inspired by Jessica’s emergent project, AfroJudaica, the workshop will explore themes of home, diaspora, return, and liberation through storytelling, text study, and art-making. No previous art experience is required. Event chaired by Yolanda Savage-Narva. Part of the Museum’s new Jews of Color Creative Workshops Series.

About the Artist

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. Inspired by the earth-based traditions of her Black American and Jewish ancestry, her art activates ancestral wisdom, personal reflection, and community study.

Jessica’s work is both balm and blueprint: mapping out pathways for the Black liberatory imagination and reviving recipes for collective care. She collaborates with organizers and cultural workers to facilitate community rituals of remembrance and conversations about reparations, abolition, earth-stewardship, and more.

She has completed fellowships with Humanities DC, The Opportunity Agenda, VisArts Studio Fellowship, Public Interest Design Lab, Intercultural Leadership Institute, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and Halcyon Arts Lab. Jessica is a recipient of the Washington Award from S&R Evermay. Iterations of her work, Black Fugitive Folklore, have been shown at the Phillips Collection, DC Arts Center, The Kreeger Museum, BlackRock Center for the Arts, Africana Film Festival, The REACH at the Kennedy Center, VisArts and Brentwood Arts Exchange.