Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jill Wells. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Jill, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
The Risk and Power of the Pivot:
“Before a dream can mature and manifest itself as real, a lot of loaded efforts come into play! You are the pivot on which those loads must be turned!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream
Within my art career of 24 years, from 1999 up to the current day, 15 of those years were spent focusing on visual arts only. In college, I fell in love with oils as my favorite medium. This medium became an extension of my creative expression and building a professional art career through this medium followed. Considering alternative or additional mediums was something I viewed as uncomfortable, and too risky. During the Renaissance period, if you had more than one craft or medium, more than one way of doing things, you were a “polymath” and this was a good thing. This led to ever-evolving bodies of work and evolution. But I never considered myself a Renaissance woman. My inhibition toward changing mediums was rooted in “if it’s not broken, don’t fit it” and the fear of the unknown. What would happen to the quality of my work and my ability to express myself? Would anyone connect with it? Just how emotional and financially stressful would changing be?
PIVOT LESSON ONE: THE REASON FOR THE PIVOT
Pivoting in my creative career started long before I was aware of it. In 1998 our family dynamic changed instantly and traumatically when an arteriovenous malformation or AVM ruptured in my brother’s brain during his sleep. An AVM is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels connecting arteries and veins, which disrupts normal blood flow. For my brother, this rupture caused massive bleeding in his brain, a heart attack, and permanent brain damage. It also was the cause of his loss of eyesight. He had just gone to prom, was about to graduate from High School, and was working on restoring his 1979 Chevy Silverado. Growing up my brother was that kid who would place multiple garbage cans in the driveway, as his opponents to dribble and move as he drove towards the hoop attached to our garage. This taught me an extremely valuable lesson. If you meet a person, who intentionally places obstacles in their own way over and over again in life to better themselves, you better watch out for that person when life itself places obstacles in their own way!
PIVOT LESSON TWO: THE RISK OF NOT CHANGING
Seven years into his recovery we sat down around Christmas time to paint together…we both found ourselves lost. On the other side of a host of BIG emotions from this event was a life-changing lesson. The power of touch in the creative process and in the perceptual art experience. The sense of touch is one of the central forms of perceptual experience. Touch occurs across the whole body using a variety of receptors in the skin. Asking my brother to use a paintbrush interrupted his perception. While this is not the case for all individuals living with different levels of sight impairments, it is the case for my brother. This was a transformative moment. A moment where my mindset changed. I knew I had to change. This was a thee pivot point. I faced myself with this one question. “Are you ok with looking back at the end of your life, knowing you could have done something about this thing that truly troubles you, and saying you did NOTHING about it?” And what was this thing troubling me? For me, it was the awareness that my visual works were not universally accessible.
PIVOT LESSON THREE: REACTION TIME
Being resolute and confident in myself in this process took time. While my enthusiasm and energy to take this leap were immediate, building new skills, new connections, and relationships was not immediate. Pivoting into a vast landscape of new mediums, diverse human experiences, and community engagement beyond what I had ever done before could not be rushed. Change is always happening, whether we are aware of it or not. Learning how to respond to these ongoing changes in the creative process vs. reacting was and is key.
PIVOT LESSON FOUR: QUESTION, QUESTION, QUESTION
My painting professor always encouraged her students to question what is art and who is an artist. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures. Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. An artist put simply, is someone who creates art…and what is art? I began to question my perception of myself as an artist in pivoting. For me, I made the conscious choice to step away from the studio and into the counseling seat in my path moving forward. Over an eight-year time span, I explored the artful tools of listening, intervention, relationship building, empathy, and goal setting. Counseling is a creative, multidimensional process that focuses on helping others change. As a creative I feel a great responsibility to use my art to provide a thoughtful critique of the different systems at work in our society; to make this world more accessible, universal, inclusive, empathetic, and delightful. No matter the risk you are taking, no matter the pivot in life, I believe it is very important to understand your creative tools and believe you are an artist in creating your change.
PIVOT LESSON FIVE: RE-EXAMINE
In 2020, after an eight-year career as a Certified Alcohol and Substance Use Counselor for the State of Iowa, I reexamined my creative career and decided to finally make art my full-time pursuit. After working with and learning from top professionals in art therapy, clinical fields, mental health, and disability rights fields, I was ready. I leaped into creating with multiple mediums and partnered with diverse institutions and non-profits. The power of this pivot led to the BLACKBOARD Sensory Art Project. A Project I established in 2020 to develop sensory-inclusive accessible works of art and art experiences based on four primary questions.
1) What is art to you?
2) What is accessibility to you?
3) What makes art inaccessible for you?
4) What role does art play in your life?
I started to integrate the power of touch, using Braille, into my artwork and asked observers to “Please DO touch the artwork?” to provide a broader, more inclusive sensory perception of my work. I create the FELL SERIES, a multimedia series of works on the Braille pages of The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This series focuses on making art more accessible through history, tactile elements, sound, light, and color. Establishing a partnership with The Iowa Department for the Blind during this initial leap provided me with experts in the field, support, education, and a community who could help me adapt.
I began researching lightboxes, sensory art spaces, and sensory dark rooms. Both light boxes and dark sensory rooms can be extremely useful for individuals living with visual impairments as well as time in a sensory room improves visual, auditory, and tactile processing, and provides a sense of calm and comfort, to self-regulate and improve focus. I began creating touch-activated sound art that combined the FEEL Series and THE BLACKBOARD SERIES. TOUCH-ACTIVATED SOUND ART seeks to change fundamental aspects of a visitor’s interaction with art. These multimedia sound works incorporate different textures, Braille, visual composition, and musical composition.
In order to experience the public accessibility of the BLACKBOARD SENSORY ART PROJECT I debuted these works on the global stage in 2022, at the Harkin Summit in Belfast, Ireland. Next, I presented this work to the United Nations in Vienna as a Zero Project 2023 panelist. Because the long-term goal of BLACKBOARD is to look into a new future of public art that will incorporate universal, multisensory design, so that anyone, regardless of ability, can experience the artwork. That means art that could be moveable for different statures and abilities, tactile murals accessible via touch and sound, early education sensory art spaces, and public and private inclusive art spaces.
My art practice has always been the pathway that allows me to live life without regret by doing something about the problems that trouble me. My work explores intersectional social issues of racism, unequal opportunity, disability discrimination, and inaccessible design, and seeks solutions in and through art. In creating, I can experience clarity and access the past and the present to increase the quality of life for others, leading to better social integration for others and myself now and into the future.
I make paintings, murals, immersive/interactive installations incorporating sound and light, and tactile/touch-based art, to prompt dialogue around diversity, accessibility, and unity. I choose to make art that is itself more accessible to marginalized audiences by its physical composition; its placement in skywalk systems, public schools, and city buildings; and by narratives of inclusivity and collaboration. My artistic representations of marginalized cultures, populations, and communities are, within themselves, acts of resistance against systems of oppression. Through my practice as an artist, advocate, and mentor, I aspire to dismantle these systems by elevating the power of accessibility through art and exhibiting the social changes that occur as a result.
Jill, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Jill Wells, BFA, CADC
Born 1980, Des Moines, IA
Resides Des Moines, IA
EDUCATION
2005 BFA, Drake University, Des Moines, IA
My name is Jill Wells, I am a 42-year-old Black Indigenous Person of Color, with short black hair. A 2005 graduate of Drake University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I began painting with my maternal Grandmother at the age of 7 and never stopped. I am best known for my dynamic, colorful, murals and tactile works investigating race, history, stereotypes, accessibility, and human experiences. By exploring the powerful alignment between arts integration and Universal Design, my work seeks solutions for innovative pathways into accessible art. As an artist, I am a problem solver, and much of my work is focused on how I get from point A to point Z. The problems I solve are vast and endless and are connected to every type of vocation and industry.
I started my art career at the age of 19 with my first public mural. A Des Moines non-profit owner and activist who knew I was in college for art, asked me if I would be interested in doing a mural inside their building and that is how I got started. I had no experience with creating murals, no mentor or teacher to show me how and this was 1999…so no Google and no YouTube. Figuring it out by trial and error with an Elmo overhead projector and scaffolding is how the mural got done. To date, I have completed over 35 murals nationally and internationally.
In my practice, I engage with individuals of all abilities, through various interdisciplinary art workshops and talks to create new modes of working through the arts, that are inclusive and representational. Without shying away from the complicated socio-political histories relevant to the world, My artwork is represented in the permanent collections of The Havelocks, Dublin, Ireland, The Center of Afrofuturist Studies at Public Space One, The City of Iowa City, The University of Iowa; The Evelyn K. Davis Center for Working Families, and Disability Rights Iowa.
From 2012-20 I served as a Certified Alcohol and Substance Use Counselor for the state of Iowa as an inpatient and outpatient substance use counselor. In 2020 I founded Artists X Advocacy Mentorship Program (AXA). The focus of AXA is to bring awareness to art as a career option, especially for individuals living with disabilities. AXA came out of a direct need to cultivate an environment, in Iowa, in which creativity could thrive through community works of art, advocacy work, and community partnerships.
In 2021 I was the recipient of the Iowa Arts & Culture Resilience Grant. Additionally, in 2021, I was a TEDx speaker on The Power of Public Art. In 2022 I became the first Harkin Institute Artist Fellow and was the lecturing artist for Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem for The Resistance Course on “The Disability Art, Revolution, and Advocacy in the USA”. Her artwork is represented in the permanent collections of The Havelocks, Dublin, Ireland, In 2023 I spoke at the United Nations, in Vienna, as a panelist on Inclusive Street Art. Over the next two years, I will be creating sensory-inclusive works of art and conducting research and programming focused on accessibility in art and leading discourse about accessibility in and through the arts.
A project I am most proud of is The FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Project:
November 2022 – Current
The FOE Project, in partnership with Mosaic in Central Iowa, The Greater Des Moines Public Arts Foundation, Heritage Gallery, Mainframe Studios, and The Harkin Institute Fellow Jill Wells, presents a 10-artist group project. The FOE project and exhibition promote the full participation of individuals living with disabilities in and through the arts.
An evergreen project, FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION underscores the relationship between human experiences and the right to freedom of expression and opinion as essential to the ability of persons of all disabilities to develop as individuals and to participate fully in all aspects of life on an equal basis. All the works in the FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION PROJECT are created by artists from around central Iowa, who identify to be living with disabilities. The artists’ work is profiled in a mini-documentary by Very Local | Hearst Television and Digital Moxie Studios, as part of the project and exhibition.
The main things I want potential clients/followers/fans to know about my work:
2020-Current
I am currently leading two initiatives for the state of Iowa through my public art practice and through my mentorship program and my Harkin Institute Fellowship work.
1) A multisensory art and wellness space initiative.
Sensory-friendly art spaces, that incorporate universal, multisensory design, can be extremely useful for individuals of all abilities. Time in a sensory space improves one’s visual, auditory, and tactile processing, and provides a sense of calm and comfort, to self-regulate and improve focus. Sensory spaces can also be used to offer therapeutic services to individuals. The goal of this initiative is to increase the accessibility of and to sensory-friendly art spaces in Iowa with the aim of providing opportunities for engagement in self-care, prevention, education, crisis de-escalation strategies, play, and curiosity creation.
2) A 3D mural modeling initiative.
Approximately 12 million people 40 years and older in the United States have vision impairment, including 1 million who are blind, as reported by the CDC, in December of 2022. A study supported by Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) and the National Eye Institute found that the prevalence of visual impairment and blindness in the U.S. is expected to double over the next 35 years.
While the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed more than 30 years ago, individuals living with vision impairments face great challenges to experience and understand visual artworks independently due to the lack of accessible art. The 3D mural modeling project is needed to fulfill the goals of the ADA in and through arts for the state of Iowa. The models allow those with vision impairments to experience art through touch, Braille, English text, and audio/video descriptions (via QR codes). Currently, no public mural models like this exist for the disabled community in Iowa or the Midwest. 3D models of public murals are such an innovative approach that they just began appearing in 2022. This powerful and important solution to accessible art was immediately supported, funded, and profiled by the United Nations Zero Project in 2023. As one of the United Nations panelists on the topic of Inclusive Street Art, Jill Wells immediately partnered with the fabricators of these 3D mural models to bring this innovation to Iowa. The first 3D mural model will be installed at King Elementary in Des Moines to support their new tactile mural and sensory wellness space in June 2023.
Initiative Objectives
1. Ensure that everyone has access to the public mural art regardless of ability.
2. Heighten disability awareness, express community values of diversity and inclusion, enhance the cultural environment through art, and transform the Iowa landscape.
3. Create community art spaces designed for accessibility, wellness, and inclusion.
3. Utilize 3D, tactile art in a way that shares and communicates the message and the beauty of the public murals with the audience.
4. Create employment opportunities in the arts sector for artists living with disabilities, who are under-represented, earn less than their counterparts without disabilities, and are more likely to identify a lack of access to funding as a barrier to their professional development
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
The Bible
Miller, William – Motivational Interviewing
Wilkerson, Isabel – The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Alexander, Michelle, – The New Jim Crow
Black Art: In the Absence of Light | Movie on HBO – Inspired by the work of the late artist and curator David Driskell
13th (2016) American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay
Crip Camp (2020) American documentary film directed by James Lebrecht, Nicole Newnham
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) – A documentary that chronicles artist and activist Ai Weiwei
Paris Is Burning (1990) A documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston
This is Water (2013) A video from a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace
Complete Works of Lao Tzu
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of creating and being an artist is the act of creating change and being part of the change process. The ripple effects that span out this process are endless and lifelong. 
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jillwellsart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jillwellsart/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jill.wells.10485
Image Credits
Janae Patrice Photography Andrew Clements Photography