Jamie Robertson is a visual artist and educator from Houston, Texas. She earned a BA in Art and MFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston. She also holds an MS in Art Therapy from Florida State University. She is a former recipient of the American Art Therapy Association's Pearlie Roberson Award and Red Bull Arts Microgrant. In 2022, she was selected to participate in ACRE Residency in Wisconsin. Robertson is also one half of the podcast, Where I See Me, which examines the presence of Black and Brown people in comics and media. Her creative practice is rooted in the recollection of the personal and collective histories of the African Diaspora through lens-based media; with a focus on the Gulf South. Her work was featured in FORECAST 2021: SF Camerawork’s Annual Survey Exhibition, Flatland Film Festival, Art League Houston, Florida A & M University Foster-Tanner Fine Arts Gallery, 516 Arts, and internationally at Contemporary Calgary in Exposure Photography Festival in Canada. Her photobook Charting the Afriscape of Leon County, TX was published in December 2020 with Fifth Wheel Press. She currently works as a Lecturer at Sam Houston State University. Artist StatementMy creative practice is an autobiographical examination of my family history. These inherited stories are constantly shifting, evolving as I sort through the living storehouse that is the African diaspora. The story of an axe that becomes a lightning rod and Bibles opened to Psalms 91 in every room, become more than superstitions. The stories and the images they conjure are the foundations of my work in the beginning of my understanding of the African retentions present within my family. The excavation of archives and a growing understanding of African metaphysics such as Bantu-Kongo Expressions of the universe through the idiom of Dikenga inform my art. My immersion in the Diaspora creates a new understanding of the world, thus building a matrix of Africanness and Blackness. The ‘Home Place,’ the land my family has owned for generations, is the site of my creative practice. My family’s collective memory of our Africanisms is a trace that serves as the beginning of reconciliation to ancestral concepts of place, time and the sacred.