{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Truth In This Art","title":"DMV Visual Artist Khadija Jahmila Turns Reclaimed Materials Into Diasporic Storytelling","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4603,"description":"In this episode of The Truth In This Art, the guest is Khadija Jahmila!\n\nAbout Khadija Jahmila: Silver Spring, Maryland–based Afro-Caribbean mixed-media artist, mother, and teaching artist working across hand-cut analog and digital collage. Her pieces pull from folklore and surrealism, layering found and donated print material onto wood panels and reclaimed metal to explore what gets carried forward and what gets left behind.\nJahmila talks about the apartment building her family first lived in after settling in Maryland, and how a printed photo of that building became what she calls the \"spark image\" for a larger piece she made during her residency at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. She also remembers the exact moment she started calling herself an artist: twenty-one years old, sitting on a sidewalk outside her freshman dorm, writing poetry and reading it back to herself. Good enough that she believed it.\n\nMuch of the conversation circles back to material. Jahmila started out working almost exclusively with paper, building early pieces from posters she'd picked up after the People's Climate March. Residencies pushed her further, onto wood, onto salvaged street signs, into printing photographs for the first time instead of only scavenging them. She talks about surrealism as something closer to survival than style, a way the African diaspora has always reached for new realities when the old ones didn't leave room to breathe. \"We are building the world we want to see,\" she says at one point, almost in passing.\n\nJahmila also walks through how her relationship with Eaton DC started small, at a local pop-up market, when the hotel's program director stopped in front of one of her digital collages and asked if she'd ever thought about a show. That conversation led to her first solo exhibition, Hindsight is 2020, a piece she nearly lost when her basement flooded mid-project. She talks about salvaging what survived and finishing the work anyway, water damage and all.\nThere's...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/JOa6JbGOYOtDQMaChk3GEjdMaqieN4aTVZIMSZjm84c/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85Y2U0/ZjJkMjUzNTFiYjlh/NTNkMDAxNzg0Y2Iy/ZWI5My5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}