Jessica Monette, MFA '24, selected to exhibit at MoAD

Current art practice MFA candidate, Jessica Monette ('24), is announced as a recipient of the Annual Emerging Artists Program at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.
The Emerging Artists Program highlights local, emerging, and mid-career visual artists and art collectives through solo exhibitions that reflect the cultural and artistic richness of the African diaspora. This year, five San Francisco Bay Area artists were selected from among hundreds of applicants for the opportunity to exhibit at MoAD: Mary Graham, Corinne Smith, Zekarias Thompson, Jessica Monette, and Soleé Darrell.
Monette's solo exhibition titled Unveiling Histories: A Fabricated Archive will be on view Nov. 6 - Dec. 15, 2024.
This exhibition is a deeply personal exploration, tracing fragmented pieces of Monette's lineage disrupted not only by the Middle Passage but by ongoing events that challenge her ability to sustain a familial archive. The turbulent terrain of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 further underscored the difficulty of this preservation. From ancient to recent pasts, this collection amalgamates items and information, forming a fabricated archive that documents a colonial and ancestral past reshaped by historical turbulence. Originally from New Orleans, Jessica Monette's work delves into her heritage, weaving tangible yet elusive threads of ancestral legacies. The work then becomes a gumbo of artifacts that are inherited, found and fabricated. Monette's artistic expression spans the realms of painting, sculpture, installation, and more seamlessly connecting these themes.