Jamea Richmond-Edwards (b. Detroit, MI) is a painter and mixed-media artist whose practice constructs opulent, mythic worlds that center Black womanhood, cultural memory, and self-determination. Her work fuses personal history with a visionary aesthetic, creating monumental narratives that challenge dominant visual hierarchies while reclaiming space for Black subjects within art historical and cultural discourse.

Richmond-Edwards’ compositions often feature self-portraits and portraits of family and friends reimagined as avatars—protagonists who traverse celestial landscapes saturated with kaleidoscopic color, pattern, and ornamentation. Rendered in stark black-and-white and set against sumptuous, layered environments, these figures appear at once grounded and otherworldly, signaling a refusal of linear time and Eurocentric narratives. Through this interplay of realism and mysticism, the artist reclaims portraiture as a site of liberation, positioning Black identities not as objects of consumption but as architects of worlds.

Her practice is deeply informed by an interdisciplinary sensibility that draws from cultural history, mythology, and fashion aesthetics. Hip-hop style and Detroit’s vibrant sartorial codes of the 1990s reverberate throughout her paintings in the form of bold palettes, intricate embellishments, and compositional dynamism. At the same time, her engagement with AfriCOBRA’s chromatic philosophy and Howard University’s pedagogical legacy foregrounds an enduring commitment to Black artistic traditions of radical beauty and affirmation. The influence of her Mississippi Choctaw and Creek heritage further enriches her iconography, embedding her images with ancestral memory and an ethic of cultural continuity.

Embedded within this lush visuality is a rigorous critique of representation. Richmond-Edwards interrogates the paradox of Black women’s hypervisibility as consumers of luxury brands and simultaneous exclusion from the narratives those brands construct. By incorporating elements that reference fashion’s symbolic codes, her work subverts dominant aesthetics, asserting an alternative lexicon where adornment becomes armor and opulence becomes a language of sovereignty.

Born and raised in Detroit, Richmond-Edwards came of age amid the socio-economic devastation wrought by the crack and AIDS epidemics—conditions that haunt her practice as spectral reminders of systemic neglect and resilience. These histories, refracted through fantastical narratives, become portals for imagining futures beyond dispossession.

A graduate of Jackson State University (BFA) and Howard University (MFA), Richmond-Edwards has exhibited at major institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Rubell Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, California African American Museum, and MOCA North Miami. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and has held residencies nationally and internationally. Through her commanding, maximalist visual language, Richmond-Edwards offers not only images but worlds—sites of beauty, critique, and unbounded possibility.