'The Spectrum of Resilience' Exemplifies Artistic Persistence
It is often said that we must make our dreams a reality, but few take that quite as literally as artist Jazlyne Sabree. Her work begins in the subconscious, her sleeping mind acting as the nascent canvas for her next masterpiece. The imagery of her dreams lingers throughout her waking hours until she is compelled to bring them to life with her signature mixed media collages, though she often refers to them simply as paintings.
Sabree explains, “The fact that they are collages usually comes up after experiencing my work. It is what I like to call ‘figurative abstraction,’ because the work is figurative and the forms are non-identifiable, inspired by West African iconography and themes.”
Her latest exhibition, “The Spectrum of Resilience,” on display at the Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, is the outward culmination of years of research into her own ancestry and a life well lived, “living as process” as Sabree would call it. Though the ancestral research began outside of a need to create art, the knowledge of her family’s history infiltrated her dreams, inspiring her to share what she had learned.
In 2019, she began combing through census records, maps, and articles to create a family tree that goes back eight generations. She tested her DNA and was able to connect herself to different ancestors and tribes.
“While I was doing all of that research, I remember having very vivid dreams. I was going to sleep and seeing images of artwork in my mind. I listened to those dreams and tried to find understanding within them. It became my mission to visually create these things that I was seeing in my dreams. They included a lot of patterns, and they were large and figurative, very abstract. I was an art teacher in Camden, NJ at the time, and that last year that I was teaching, I knew that I needed that time to complete these pieces, so I applied to grad school, where I had the space and time to sit with my art materials and experiment and explore.”
It wasn’t until she entered graduate school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2022 that she was able to find a way to realize these connections visually. She would photograph poignant moments in her life, whether they be photo captures of herself or others; these stolen moments would become the base layer of her dream-inspired imagery.
“I’m just living my life most days, and I will have these glimmers, these moments where I feel this buzz within myself that tells me ‘you need to paint this. This moment that you’re in, this needs to be photographed. This needs to be captured. This will make a really strong message.’”
Many artists will relate to this glimmer, the elusive feeling outside of oneself, the little voice that cannot be silenced until satiated by creation that enables persistence and resilience in all artistic pursuits. Sabree detailed this moment as it relates to her piece, Between Drips and Dignity. The piece, like all others in the collection, contains a non-identifiable figure, but Sabree freely shares that she was the sitter [the subject] for this piece. Having endured a five-day stint in the hospital due to a lupus flare-up, Sabree found herself pushing past the pain to do small things each day that made her feel like herself. She would take a small daily walk or make sure to put her makeup on, and amidst one of those moments, attached to an IV line (colloquially referred to as a “drip”), she felt the glimmer.
“I knew that I needed to capture a photo of that moment. When I take pictures, I do intend to look at them again, but I do not necessarily know what will end up as a painting. But I do remember knowing that I needed to capture photos of myself [in the hospital] so that I could sit with them, in case the world needed to see this. There’s a lot of dignity, even in the posture, sitting upright with a little bit of swag. But thinking of and remembering that moment, I was very scared. I was in a lot of pain. That’s where the title of that painting was born. One moment I’m getting the IV put into me and the next I’m putting on my lipstick.”
The artwork is a commentary on a longstanding question. “How do you find your resilience when you aren’t strong? When you’re at your most vulnerable? The resilience is simply in your persistence to exist. We have to allow others to care for us, allow others to help. We always hear about resilience as black people, but we don’t often think about the fact that we shouldn’t have to be” she recounts.
In supporting this notion of allowing others to help and utilizing her artwork as a vehicle of advocacy and community building, Sabree reflects on the responsibility she feels to share her vulnerability and the personal findings she has discovered through her own ancestral examination.
“I began to reflect on the level of privilege that I had to trace my family back eight generations because, as an African American person, that is quite uncommon due to the different atrocities of slavery and the treatment of these human beings who suffered. I knew that I had to do something with that privilege. I wanted to offer that information back out into the world to provide this basis of African diasporic identity and all of the different layers of blackness that fold into that.
“I wanted not only to explore the imagery that I was seeing in my dreams but to make sure that I was disseminating the nature of this work, and the research, and the findings back into the community so that other people can have a bit more to look at when they’re trying to explore their own identity to work towards their only healing from this atrocity that has affected us.”
Learning the intricacies of Jazlyne Sabree’s process is inspiring and because this exhibition is featured at a museum attached to a center for higher education, it is only fitting that she share her wisdom with students and aspiring artists:
“My advice would be to keep creating. When I think back on my journey as an artist, the one thing that was consistent is that I kept creating. The art that I was creating as an undergrad looks nothing like the work that I create today but my impulses were always the same. It has always been rooted in community and advocacy, and carried a lot of research. Sometimes life will try to pull you away but you have to cling on to as much of your artistry and your practice as you can. As long as you continue to create, you will find that place in your journey where you are able to truly commit to it. From there, the sky is the limit.”
The exhibition, now open to the public, will remain on display through June 27, 2026 at the Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art.
