We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Santo Jacobsson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Santo, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

This past year I had the honor of being the first visual artist in residence for a non-profit art collective called “The Village” (@iminthevillage). I had pitched making a guide on how to navigate life as a trans masc person, but naturally, it transformed into different life lessons I have faced after medically transitioning. I divided the book into 4 chapters: The Mind, Body, Social, and Spiritual. The division of each subject was more of a way for me to approach different issues I was facing because each topic was inseparable from the other. I would sit down and write the core of the truth of what I was feeling/ learning about myself, then work on illustrating the physical and social settings that brought this feeling out of me. I worked with the 3 people in the Village to have a work-in-progress show every 3 months. To receive feedback of viewers helped me realize that although I was making this guide for trans people like myself, it brought out a feeling of universality and recognition for all who engaged with the pieces.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a trans masc illustrator based in New York. I am half Swedish and half Ecuadorian, identities that formed who I am because of the time I spent with my extended family in both countries. I went to Parsons for my BFA in Illustration and realized I was trans in my first year at university. I have always craved a broader sense of representation and use the parallels between my multicultural experiences with my trans identity as fuel for creativity. As I have been working on a graphic memoir, and many side jobs, I have created a brand called “Coming 4 Your Neck”. Its mission is to create euphoria-centered necklaces for all genders using pearls, glass, and custom beads. Growing up, the women in my family bonded through jewelry and their love for pearls, and they have become a symbol of self-preservation and outlasting beauty for me. Starting and running this brand has been rewarding in many different ways, with a meditative experience of beading all the necklaces on my own, to creating visuals to support my brand and create a story. I have been able to create a community with people who buy my necklaces, support my art, and meet through these events. Forming those bonds feels like what I was meant to do.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I think the best project I did on Instagram which gave me a consistently growing amount of followers at the time was a series I called “Ghost Portraits”. I did this in the summer of 2020, when I was at home with my family in Minneapolis, just before the murder of George Floyd. I had been socially transitioning as a trans guy, changed my name and pronouns for 2 years at that point, but had not started medically transitioning until November of 2020. I was scrolling on Instagram and fell through a rabbit hole of trans accounts, and the majority of the posts were hype fem to a hyper-masculine representation of trans guys, showing their dramatic change after going on hormones. I felt frustrated that it felt that the word “transitioning” was reserved only for people who medically transitioned, and I wanted to claim it for myself and any other trans/non-binary people. So I created a series of portraits for people to say what “transitioning” meant to them, be it their name, pronouns, hair, hormones, or just the way they see themselves. I was able to do portraits of people in the U.S. and around the world. I have been lucky to form friendships with people I met through this project.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

The book that made me want to be an illustrator and have a holistic approach to everything I make is “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout” by Lauren Redniss. I discovered a hardcover copy of it in my library in High school. The story is well-researched, but the visuals and materials used to make it shift something in me. To nod to the pioneering research she did with radioactive elements polonium and radium, Lauren Redniss used light-sensitive paper to illustrate. One night, after reading the book for an hour with the lights on, I put the book to the side to sleep and turned off the light. I felt a light on the other side of my closed eyes, and when I opened them, I saw that the cover glowed in the dark. That moment made me so excited that I decided to go into arts instead of math which led me to have her as my thesis professor at Parsons. It also made me want to put care into the materials I use, the research I do, and an unrestricted approach to story telling.

Contact Info:

• Website: santojacobsson.com and coming4yourneck.com
• Instagram: santojacobsson, coming4yourneck
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/santo-jacobsson2023/

Image Credits
For the Photographs please credit Patience Ojionuka (@patienceojionuka on Instagram) and the art is my own.