ARTS&LIFE
COURTESY OF JESSICA HAUSER
ART
Jessica Hauser
Oodles of B Doodles Jessica Hauser’s ‘Joy Doodles’ bring back childhood memories of her late father.
ROBIN SCHWARTZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER
38
|
JUNE 3 • 2021
y day, Jessica Hauser is a dynamic nonprofit leader doing everything in her power to ensure Detroit students have the tools they need to succeed. As executive director of the Downtown Boxing Gym, her days are filled with nonstop Zoom meetings and tackling significant concerns like funding, staffing and getting emergency food to families as well as overseeing the free afterschool academic and athletic program’s operations alongside Khali Sweeney, DBG’s founder and CEO. It was a big job before COVID-19 and the pandemic amplified everything. “We were working 20-hour days,” says Hauser, a former member with her family of Temple Emanu-El in Oak Park.
“It’s been a super stressful year.” Enter Joy Doodles, the one thing Hauser says helped her get through some of the toughest times. Joy Doodles is her name for a free-form style of drawing and painting that she first recalls doing as a young child with her late father, Joel Hauser. Sadly, he was hit and killed by a drunk driver when Jessica was just 10 years old, changing her family and the course of her life forever. “He would sit and draw these squiggly lines and tell me to just be as creative as possible to fill them in,” she recalls. “Something about it was just really calming. My favorite thing about it is there are no boundaries. You can create your own thing; you can really express yourself.” Decades after drawing with
