Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Jessica Monette

Jessica Monette

East Palo Alto, California

Untitled, Dissemination is a sculptural assemblage in a fan shape hung against a cinnamon-brown wall. At the base of the fan shape is a black casting of a face with eyes closed, flanked by two additional faces with patterning, beaded crowns frame the faces, and layered husks and materials fan out upwards, over a linear drawing on the wall. On the ground is a small planter with a cactus.

Untitled, Dissemination

2024

Mores Profit is an open umbrella frame with the canopy made up of woven twine, rope, and strings of colorful beads. Fringe rings the perimeter of the canopy, and the piece lies on the ground in a gallery with the canopy propped up by the curved handle.

Mores Profit

2024

Each of the six square panels comprising Sedimentation is nearly covered with rippling fabric, nets, and other material painted dark brown against a lighter peachy-brown background. The panels are hung in a long row against a cinnamon-brown wall.

Sedimentation

2024

This square painting, Kat 4, 2021, shows a view down into flooded streets. Rows and blocks of buildings and roofs are loosely painted in muted red, purple, white, and yellow amid the slate-blue waters.

Kat 4, 2021

2021

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Jessica Monette

Jessica Monette is a Black artist who looks at us, wearing glasses and a black vest over a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair is braided into a topknot, and she wears a nose ring and hoop earrings.

Jessica Monette is a New Orleans-born, Bay Area-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Using materials like soil, rope, and familial textiles, she explores cultural memory, displacement, and survival. Rooted in personal and collective histories, including Hurricane Katrina and systems linked to the transatlantic slave trade, her work blends abstraction and figuration to reimagine archives lost to historical erasure and environmental catastrophe. She holds an MFA from Stanford University, where Black literary scholarship has helped shape her practice. Jessica has presented a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora and has an upcoming solo show at the de Saisset Museum. She completed a residency at Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, investigating cultural retentions between Bahia and New Orleans. Jessica is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and San Francisco State University, where she approaches art education as a tool for critical social engagement.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ While much of my work engages themes of memory, cultural legacy, and Black resilience, the material language I use is just as central to the storytelling. I often work with found or inherited materials, rope, soil, worn clothing, nails, Mardi Gras beads, not just for their texture or form, but for the lives they’ve touched.”