Jayla Millen is a teaching and practicing artist based in the Twin Cities.

Exploring systemic and familial cycles is an essential component of Jayla’s work. She investigates the impact of generational patterns on the human body through ancestral memory and history. She creates a color language and utilizes the materiality of mediums to represent the physicality of emotion in her body, the bodies of her family members, and the bodies of women in her community. This work allows Jayla to connect with and process the emotions and experiences that have been passed down to her for generations. 

The bright colors and playfulness of her recent work is heavily influenced by a childlike perspective. She looks back at experiences from a whimsical lens of her childhood self, balancing hardship and chaos with magic and love. She is additionally inspired by witnessing children’s artwork as a teaching artist. This raw form of art making causes her to apply colors and reimagine space in order to bring adults back into their childhood imagination.

Interviewing the women in her family is necessary to understand her familial cycles and how they came to her. Through this interview process Jayla learned about the devastating effects which misogyny, domestic abuse, poverty, and cycles of violence have had on her lineage. She began working with her hands: crocheting, sculpting, and building to transform the heavy weight of her family's stories. 

Jayla’s work is a reflection of the realities which her and her community cannot avoid, and therefore the viewer cannot avoid either. She uses bright, contrasting colors and unsettling imagery to force the viewer to confront these feelings and burdens that she is forced to carry every day. Her work is a soft seduction to her voice that has been stripped from Jayla her entire life; it is the catalyst of her voice, her mother’s voice and her grandmother's voice, actively resisting the silence that has been forced on them for generations.