Jahniah Kum

Jahniah Kum

Booth 018
I am an interdisciplinary Caribbean-American artist whose work tends to the evolving shape of grief through self-portraiture, material experimentation, storytelling, and family archive. Shaped by the loss of my mother in 2019, and informed by bell hooks’s framework of “re-membering,” my practice navigates the question: What does it mean to be whole when something vital is missing? Functioning both as a compass and mirror–creating tension in my work that dissects themes of: Identity, belonging, loss, memory, and girlhood. Through self-portraiture and materiality, I survey this question, projecting my fears onto a recurring figure who inhabits psychological landscapes I cannot personally bear. Engaging with the framework of the body as archive, this figure first emerged as a site of reclamation but has since evolved into a threshold where binaries: figurative and abstract, presence and absence, memory and transformation, folklore and reality can coexist. In 2025 my paintings: “Martyr, 2024” and “Martyr’s Return (Duppy), 2025” develop this psychological space where the figure transforms from a sulking martyr into a wandering soul. In Jamaican folklore, a duppy is a soul not at rest. When creating these paintings, I asked what it means to never be absolved of your grief, which led me to paint my childhood memory with this chimeral spirit. This work engages with dialogue and research around mythologies of Afro-futurism, specifically through the lens of grief work, illuminating technologies of survival. Experimenting with burlap, mulberry paper, denim, converted family tapes, photography, and printmaking, I build a register of emotional, ancestral and material depth. Connecting personal and diasporic histories using material specificity to maintain ways of making and storytelling in my practice. I am committed to developing methodologies of survival within this artistic framework. I am not interested in offering solace or a solution in grieving, but another perspective on where we go when grief is not addressed, who we can be, and what it can transform into.
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  • Brandon Hill

    Brandon Hill

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    Jahniah Kum
    $2,000.00
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  • Montego Bay

    Montego Bay

    Jahniah Kum
    $2,580.00
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  • 1 in the Same

    1 in the Same

    Jahniah Kum
    $150.00
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  • Haven

    Haven

    Jahniah Kum
    $5,000.00
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  • Daline

    Daline

    Jahniah Kum
    $400.00
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  • Aunty Babeth

    Aunty Babeth

    Jahniah Kum
    $1,500.00
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  • Thanksgiving

    Thanksgiving

    Jahniah Kum
    $2,500.00
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  • Synergy

    Synergy

    Jahniah Kum
    $4,500.00
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  • Enough

    Enough

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