Join us for the reception of Zimele's Dream with Dr. Tara Jones, aka Zimele, showcasing paintings and drawings that bring together the Black feminist imagery. These images explore, elevate, and celebrate themes of Black womxn's sexualities, maternity, mothering, situating Black womxn as portals, containers, and embodiments of African divinities and ancestral knowledge and wisdom. The colorfully vibrant collection imagines Black womxn as intercessors between cosmic and temporal realms, thereby serving as protectors and creators of Black peoples and Black futures. Together, the featured pieces chronicle the archetypal constellations of Black womxn's spiritual journeys towards healing, empowerment, uplift, and self-making through creative praxis and unconscious revelations.
Dr. Tara Jones, aka Zimele, is a visual and spoken word artist, whose paintings and drawings explore themes of Africana womxn’s sexualities, spiritualities, healing, rest and rebirth, and the Black female body as divine temple and cosmic portal. The artist experiences artistic images as retrievals of memory and revelations of deeper and unconscious dimensions of psyche that when tended to can facilitate processes of self-making. Her visual work has been featured on covers of the National Political Science Review, a publication of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and debuted at UCSB’s Multicultural Center’s 2011 exhibit, Bridging Through the Arts: Transracial Community Building. She is the 2023 winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Anna Julia Cooper Award.
The artist also holds a Ph. D. in Depth Psychology, specializing in Community, Liberation, & Eco-Psychologies, a Masters in the Science of Teaching, a Masters of Arts in Counseling Psychology, a Master’s of Arts in Depth Psychology, and a UCSB alum in Black Studies and Sociology. Her areas of research include: teacher well-being, cross-professional applications from counseling to teaching, Pan Africanism and educational fugitivity, revolutionary black mothering, black maternal necropolitics, healing, and legacies of transnational African diasporic research. Her scholarly works have been published in the journal, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism and the anthology, Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline. Through her diverse career paths, she has served as a: NYC public school teacher, social-emotional learning facilitator for teens and young adults, psychotherapist, art therapist, and employment specialist. She currently coordinates UCSB’s African diasporic Cultural Resource Center.
