SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson

by Jen Stevens

Visual artist, composer, and curator Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a Brown University and RISD graduate currently serving as the Rhode Island Department of Health’s (RIDOH) Artist-in-Residence. Her extensive body of work explores critical race theory, the Atlantic slave trade, Black feminist theory, museum interpretation, and new media studies. Options checked in with LeeJohnson, who identifies as queer, to learn about her role with RIDOH.

What health disparities have you focused on while serving as the RI Department of Health's Artist-in Residence?

Disparities across race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality, are all connected, and can all be linked to our health. I am committed to engaging, inserting, and asserting marginal bodies through the arts as a means to mend societal fissures across these intersections of identities and experiences.

I am working with the offices of Minority Health, Refugee Health, Comprehensive Cancer Control, Asthma, and the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) working group to address health disparities around trauma, nutrition, quality of life/palliative care, environmental effects on health, sexual health awareness, and building with, sustaining, and helping to support community. And lastly addressing the overall dissemination of health information.

Around nutrition, I am launching a graphic novel cookbook that connects refugee and non-refugee youth with elders. Many refugees begin to acquire US health issues: high blood pressure, diabetes, stress-related smoking and drinking, weight gain, etc. Refugee youth especially struggle with nutrition because they often reject food and recipes from their culture in hopes to assimilate by eating American food. This project aims to connect folks to each other and their culture through cooking, and uses the graphic novel medium to preserve the stories and experiences around food.

I am working with Asthma [on] a public art project that will investigate the historical connections between the Port of Providence slavery/ colonialism, relationships to tribes, and the contemporary combination of concentrated poverty, housing quality, air quality, and noxious land use. I am working with the SOGI working group to create sustainable connections across generations of LGBTQ community partners. Through a series of roundtables and artistic collaborations, I hope to develop visual material around sexual health awareness, gender identity understanding, and perhaps a float for the Pride parade.

Why should art-based approaches be used as a strategy to address health inequities?

Art functions in many cadences. Sometimes a feeling, a pain, an emotion can’t be articulated or processed in words. The arts gets at the interstices of our health and our daily life to process the more complex nuances of ourselves and our social systems, not only on a therapeutic level, but also as a means to communicate.

Art is a way to give voice, to share stories, to disseminate information, to process trauma, to heal, to reconnect to the body; to build understanding, communication, and common language despite difference; to create campaigns, and movement that can ultimately change policy. A song can spread awareness, or soothe, or release, or build one’s lungs, amplify one’s voice, activate one’s memory. And that’s just a song. I guess what I’m saying is that art works. Art is truly a transformative, powerful, underutilized, optimal tool. And we need effective tools to make real change.

How can public agencies engage artists to help fulfill their missions?

Artists are embedded in the community, and use their medium of choice to share something in a different mode. There is a disconnect and even distrust between the community and public agencies. To progress, we must create long-term community relationships utilizing multiple methods. Artists and arts can change the culture of an agency. They can literally transform the building itself (mural, hanging artwork, filling a room with music, providing arts activities to folks who occupy the agency’s building), or find new ways to engage information and different publics. Give artist a seat at the table. That is the best way that artists can help to fulfill an agency’s mission.

Please visit optiosnsri.org for Lee-Johnson’s full interview to learn more about her perspective and her many fascinating arts initiatives with RIDOH. Readers are encouraged to discover Lee-Johnson’s animation, album, many visual essays, and more at her interactive website: jazzmenleejohnson.com.

Photo by Livia Radwanski