We recently connected with Nandi Jordan and have shared our conversation below.

Nandi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had started sooner?

I spent eight years pursuing a degree in a field that, in hindsight, I was never truly passionate about. Throughout that time, I was curious, driven, and determined to reach the finish line. But looking back, I can see that the traditional work of a sociologist never stirred something deeper in me—it simply wasn’t my calling.

Years later, I often find myself returning to that period in graduate school, wondering what might have unfolded had I chosen to pursue art instead. But I always arrive at the same truth: without the long, winding path of my doctoral studies, I wouldn’t be the artist I am today. That’s not to say an art degree wouldn’t have opened doors or led me somewhere worthwhile. But what makes my work uniquely mine is precisely the journey it took to get here—the detours, the questions, the late start.

There are advantages to beginning later. By the time I began sharing my work publicly, I had already climbed a few mountains and faced down fears that once felt insurmountable. I had a bit more age and insight under my belt—and with that came the realization that the only thing standing in my way was me. Not my peers. Not my credentials. Just me. And so, with age came a quiet bravery. A little more willingness to ask, what if I stopped caring what others think? A little more readiness to bet on myself, whatever the cost.

Nandi, 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?

I am a multidisciplinary visual artist exploring the complexities and contradictions of my everyday Black life. Trained as a sociologist and self-taught as an artist, my work weaves the personal with the cultural and historical, creating layered juxtapositions of image and text.

As the daughter of social scientists, I was raised with a deep awareness of the importance of questioning, analyzing, and critiquing my beautifully complex Black world. I pursued doctoral studies in sociology believing—perhaps a bit naively—that research and scholarship were the most meaningful ways to carry on my family’s legacy. But over time, I felt called to express my critiques—of this country, our communities, and the Black bodies and minds we call our own—in more visual and visceral ways. While completing my degree, I began cutting into my dissertation, tearing apart the very books that had once grounded my thinking, and incorporating those materials into collages. That early process was both cathartic and symbolic—a search for a language that felt like my own.

Using mixed media collage, photography, and printmaking, I build motifs around family, community, and connection. Repetition and gesture are central to my practice, allowing me to confront the unspoken and grapple with my identity and lineage as a woman of color. My work functions as both self-portraiture and social critique, placing viewers inside the joys and discomforts that shape how Blackness and otherness are experienced and perceived.

Over the last few years I have been developing a series of mixed media artworks and installations called Let Me Be Magic. The series considers the psychic scars passed down to Black women and questions whether leisure and frivolousness is possible within the shadow of so-called Black Girl Magic. Pages from an instructional book on bird watching are used as both a symbol for unrestrained leisure and a reminder of guided structure. I also incorporate the repetition of various symbols as a way to illustrate the ancestral wounds carried by Black women across generations while also highlighting my own experiences with Black womanhood – walking the line between weakness/strength, pride/shame and faith/fear.

I recently completed my first public art project, Mama’s Vote, developed in collaboration with the South Los Angeles community. The yearlong project included a collage-based mural at Mama’s Chicken and Market on Slauson Avenue, paired with a voter registration drive in October 2024. The mural reflects the values and civic mission of the store’s owner, who has established Mama’s Chicken as a hub for community engagement—especially for first-time voters—and embodies my commitment to creating community-centered, collaborative artwork.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My mission is to make work that gives form to what often goes unspoken—those layered, internal experiences that exist between words: the weight of inheritance, the tension between visibility and vulnerability, the quiet negotiations of identity that happen in everyday life. I’m especially interested in how these unspoken truths live in the body, in memory, and across generations. Through my art, I aim to surface these subtleties in ways that resonate beyond the specifics of my own story, connecting with anyone who has ever wrestled with belonging, transformation, or the complexity of becoming themselves.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I was around ten or eleven, I was gifted a book called The Nothing Book. It was a hardbound book with blank white pages—no prompts, no lines, just space. I was told I could fill it however I pleased. I remember starting with one or two ideas, scribbling earnestly on those first few pages. But soon after, I looked at what I had created, disliked it deeply, and stopped. I never touched the rest of the book again.

I often return to that memory because it encapsulates so much of my early struggle with creativity. I was the child who cried over “ugly” drawings, who tore up what didn’t feel good enough. And even now, as an adult and working artist, I still sometimes feel that sting—those days when nothing I make looks like what I imagined. But the journey of an artist, I’ve come to understand, is one of resilience.

My husband, a writer and seasoned creative, helped me see that clearly. He taught me that not every idea will be brilliant, not every first draft will sing—but if you stay with it, if you push through the doubt, something surprising emerges. Sometimes it’s even better than you imagined.

That’s what keeps me going: the pursuit of the next idea, the next revelation. And when I look at The Nothing Book now, still sitting on my bookshelf, I smile. Those ideas I once rejected? They were actually pretty good.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nandijordan.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/its_nahn_dee/

Image Credits

Headshot by: Amber Valley Angelista

Mama’s Vote mural photo by: Reva Santo