Editor’s note: This article by Yazz Atmore is the latest installment of monthly contributions to Boardhawk from Ednium: The Alumni Collective. Yazz recently won Ednium’s Creator Award.
I was a club kid – a Boys and Girls Club kid.
I was very artsy, and took art classes all the time. I had dope women teachers who got me into art at the club. I was in art shows. I even learned and got to perform poetry with Slam Nuba growing up. I took music and dance classes, and my mom would always see me dancing in front of the TV.
But I stopped doing art at 13 when I didn’t get into Denver School of the Arts. It crushed my spirit. I stopped creating art for myself, and it wasn’t until 13 years later that I experienced art again as a passion.
I started in Denver Public Schools when I was four years old. My mom was my ECE teacher. I went through John Amesse Elementary, Farrell B. Howell Middle School, and then East for high school. At East, I had access to leadership development and mentorship opportunities through an organization called Colorado Uplift which directed my path after graduating.
I tried the traditional college route after graduation, and I hated it. So, I transferred to Metro State University where I could create my own degree program. I worked with the college and developed a proposal for my degree. I had to prove that it was going to be legitimate and then took the classes that I wanted to in support of my education.
My bachelor’s degree is in Supporting High-Risk Youth Through the Arts. I took art, nonprofit, culture, business, and religion classes to complete my degree.
When I graduated in 2017, I worked with Colorado Uplift and was able to mentor and teach leadership skills to high-schoolers. I was considered a teacher mentor where I would work with students in the classroom and also outside of the classroom. A lot of the work I did with students was just doing life with them— sometimes they would go grocery shopping with me, and I would teach them how to budget or I would support them with their after-school programs and extracurricular activities.
And then COVID hit, and I eventually became a middle school art teacher. Halfway through the year, my administration told me I needed to take the Praxis test to be a full-time art teacher. I freaked out; I thought I was going to lose my job. One of the requirements of the art praxis is an art portfolio. I didn’t have my own medium or practice at the time. I had only created what I did with the kids.
I remembered my Secret Santa giving me a box of collage supplies for Christmas. I started playing with it and would get these visions of colors, themes, and faces in my head that would eventually manifest on the canvas, and I started creating pieces.
Fast forward I never took the praxis, but I did develop my own medium and practice as a collage artist. So, when I saw an ad calling for Black artists during Black History Month, I reached out to display my art. I ended up selling all my pieces.
By June I was a full-time artist.
I met and learned from amazing artists, like Koko Bayer, a wheat paste muralist who taught me everything I know about wheat-pasting. In my first year as an artist, I did 10 murals of my own. My practice started evolving and it became clear that my artist’s statement is rooted in my spiritual practice.
My artist name is Chatty Ancestors. It has a meaning, a title, and a message. I like to think of my work as a portal between the divine and the viewer; how the viewer interacts with it is totally up to them after that.
I am still creating murals and teaching art classes in schools. I’ve also had a few residencies and do community organizing and advocacy. I co-founded the Kinship Arts Movement, a traveling art and education initiative that highlights, elevates, and celebrates communities of color through creation, accessibility, and advocacy of public art and art education. We held our first Kinship Arts mural Festival and had over 35 artists, half were women of color, create on the wall (ages 5-75).
I’m also working on establishing an art residency program for high schoolers, emerging artists, and established artists through my organization Irene’s Spot. I always tell folks I am a businesswoman first before I am an artist; I still have to make a living, so I am big on merging those two worlds.
Winning The Creator Award from Ednium is such an honor. Much of the work I do is for the community and to give my ancestors and spirits the platform to be seen and heard in certain spaces feels incredible. I feel proud to represent the ones who came before me and the ones who will come after me. It’s truly honoring this journey of my life.
Life is full of pivots, and we must embrace those. Very little is set in stone in this life; I expected to be a cute little art teacher and now I get to do this and so many other things because I embraced the pivot and the risk.
It does not come without challenges or obstacles and heartbreak, however at the end of the day this is your life, and you have to choose how you will journey through it.
