At his core, JP Jermaine Powell is a storyteller. His medium isn’t words, however. Instead, the mixed-media artist uses color, texture, and shape to communicate history, purpose, and connection in his paintings.
“A lot of what I do is try to take what I’ve learned and beautify this history. It’s a very unique job, because you have to listen, and you have to filter all the information that you are getting and come up with something that when people look at it, they can say: That’s our story.”
“I try to tell the stories of North Carolina. Maybe it’s not historical all the time; maybe it’s just a bird, but the story of North Carolina is the story of nature, too,” he says.
Powell lives in Fuquay-Varina with his family — a town that “feels like home” after previously residing in New York and Maryland.
Locals may know him best as the artist behind downtown Fuquay- Varina’s “Welcome Home” mural at the intersection of Main Street and Vance Street.
Murals are one of Powell’s specialties. He collects inspiration from nature, from oral histories, and from observing his surroundings to enhance the sense of place in a beautiful way.
“As I’m working, I’m observing the town. For a lot of mural artists, that’s what invigorates them. You might have an idea, but the place you are working on and the environment is going to dictate that umph,” he says.
Powell has completed several larger-than-life murals across North Carolina, including locations in Winston-Salem, Chapel Hill High School, Raleigh’s Hillsborough Street, and along I-295 in Fayetteville.
Works in progress fill the studio of artist JP Jermaine Powell.
Powell worked on the massive “We Are Fayetteville” mural for two months, all alone, on the side of a highway, uniting the city’s rich history and diverse communities with his practiced hand.
“That was a major project, bringing together all the different parts of the city: military, rural, government, academic. People would stop by on the highway, while I’m on a 60-foot lift, and ask questions.
“When you are done with that experience, it’s not necessarily the end of the project. Of course you want (the work) to be good, but for an artist, our takeaways are the experience with people and the growth of what we were before the project and who we are after,” says Powell.
“If (the walls) are done right, it makes people not feel so alone.”
Murals are just one element of Powell’s varied body of work, which extends to canvases, portraiture, and custom-painted handbags, a product he created to make his art accessible and obtainable for a range of collectors.
“Handbags are very important to people. It contains their life,” says Powell. “To be able to make that beautiful and make it uniquely theirs is very special.”
Powell recently added another talent to his growing résumé: children’s book illustrator. In a collaboration with the North Carolina Museum of Art, Powell illustrated the picture book The Museum Lives in Me by Victoria Scott-Miller of Liberation Station bookstore. The book describes a group of students exploring the NCMA’s collection on a school field trip.
From that partnership, NCMA named Powell artist in residence.
Powell checked off a lifelong bucket list item with the “Welcome Home” mural, painted in his own town. Shown here with his wife Katrina, daughter Ahna Brielle, and son Kole Nathaniel. Not pictured: son Jay Louren Powell.
“We developed the residency so that he would have the opportunity to engage with students in particular about the book and his work on it,” says Katherine White, deputy director for the NCMA.
“What’s unique about JP’s work is that he engages in so many different points of entry. He’s always got the use of money, the use of animals, the use of humans. There’s always color,” says White. “And the way he really thinks about making sure that the individuals that he’s portraying emerge in a powerful way.”
As artist in residence, Powell created a lobby installation for the museum called Imagine Love: Show Me Love that depicts Powell’s mother, wife, and children in a series of three paintings on top of a printed backdrop.
“That changed my life dramatically in the sense that I didn’t have to be dead to be (in the museum). The magnitude of it — it included my family, which was a gift, because they could see themselves in this beautiful, powerful place,” Powell says.
“It’s a beautiful experience to see that living artists matter, that local artists matter.”
“What I heard people say to me directly, including members of our staff, was that they had never felt represented in the objects in the museum in the same way that they did when his installation went up in the lobby,” says White.
Later this fall, the museum will display a new exhibition by Powell called Leadership Reimagined.
“(JP) has identified members of our community who took atypical pathways to leadership. … Together they will tell the story of reimagined leadership,” says White.
“I see them as leaders because they took initiative when they saw a problem or a barrier, and they found a purpose trying to inspire other people,” says Powell.
NCMA has long been a source of inspiration for Powell.
“Every time I got rejected, every time I had a win or an opportunity, I went there and walked around. Those men and women (artists) went through the same struggles creatively, and they left these artifacts for other people to be inspired by,” says Powell.
Powell’s signature style is a “mashup” of different techniques and artistic movements, he says.
“It’s almost like a journey,” he continues. “You take somebody’s hand with realism, then you take them on this cool journey with color, shape, abstraction. I incorporate textures and objects that people deal with in real life.”
Objects like currency, jewels, sentimental objects, and fabrics, which beckon the viewer to reach out and touch the art.
“As an artist, it seems like the challenge is breaking down the barriers of the creative world with the real world. … My job is really to communicate the connection of the human experience. That shared humanity — when everybody comes together and sees something beautiful and sees something that brings them together — that is what I do.”
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