Jahlil Nzinga: SKIN + MASKS, Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St.

Jahlil Nzinga (b. USA) is a Bay Area-born, Los Angeles- based multi-media painter whose highly emotive compositions distill his personal visual, emotional, and intellectual surroundings into loose and liberated visual compositions that provoke wonder.

Nzinga was raised in South Berkeley, where he was immersed at a young age into a multi-disciplinary world of artistic expression. He began performing as a child in a theater company founded his mother mother, Ayodele Nzinga—the first all-Black theater company in California. In the mid-2000s, under the name Keith Jenkins, a.k.a. Stunnaman, Nzinga was one of the founding members of The Pack, an groundbreaking Bay Area Hip Hop group signed to the Jive Records label.

Nzinga’s experiences as a performer and freestyle rapper inform the approach he takes to his visual arts practice, especially in terms of trusting his intuition. Each painting he creates is an act of trust between himself and his mediums. The composition is never planned, but rather emerges in the moment, guided by passion and instinct. Nzinga’s choices of mediums, which could include traditional fine art materials like acrylics, spray paint, and charcoal, or unexpected everyday materials from dust to dog hair, are inspired by whatever is available,

and the painting seems to need.

“I go paint, and then these paintings talk to me,” Nzinga says. “They tell me they remind me of my thoughts, my emotions; they pull things out of me. There is no destination that I’m aware of, but I’m always there to arrive.” Nzinga’s visual style flows from his personal experiences and his visual and intellecctual environment. His compositions incorporate a range of elements, some abstract and some distinctly figurative. Emotive, gestural brush marks, biomorphic spray painted forms, pattern fileds, and frenetic bursts of color add energy and symbolic content tot he work, while more narrative content, such as human bodies engaged in recognizable activities like sports, add a folkloric, storytelling level to

the work.

Among the most recognizable recurring aesthetic motifs in Nzinga’s paintings are linear, drawn shapes that Nzinga refers to as “one-liners,” which he creates in a single motion without his hand leaving the surface of the painting.