About Beneath the Bottle Trees:
The art residency featuring J.Renee’s eglomise, assemblage and organic reverse glass bottle tree sculptures will tell the rich history and story of her family’s African American and Indigenous Native American diaspora, as it pertains to the two main ports of entry for African slaves, Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana. This installation will begin with her ancestors arrival in America. It will document her family’s migration from three SC plantations, through reconstruction, jim crow, civil rights era. JRenee will feature her family stories recreated on painted traditional reverse glass, mix media, and her organic versions of the southern bottle trees, as she follows the cultural history of the southern “haint” trees. The art will be complemented with JRenee’s family heirlooms. Not only is it an ancestral journey, it’s a artistic and creative evolution of the artist JRenee.

About the Artist:
J’Renee is internationally known for her reverse glass paintings or Eglomise, depicting southern lifestyle themes, tropical design, and the life and times in New Orleans, pre and post Katrina. She enjoys painting images and/or scenes depicting images that promote thought on issues of social justice, history, and folklore.
Her glass paintings include tropical Gauguin-inspired figures, surrounded by poignant scenes from the city she loves and pines for — cemeteries, second lines, iron work, flood wreckage and rescue helicopters. She graduated from Xavier University in 1989 with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Her teacher and mentor was renowned artist and MacArthur Foundation recipient, John Scott. J’Renee often includes photo clippings to lend unexpectedly realistic touches to her mixed media works. Like many, J’Renee was a Katrina evacuee who was forced to move around the country before settling in Columbia, South Carolina.
She has had solo exhibitions at Ponder Gallery, in Columbia, SC and McKenna Museum of African American Art in New Orleans. Her paintings have been in group exhibition in New York City; San Diego CA; Charleston SC; Washington DC and New Orleans, LA. She was featured in several Haitian exhibits at the United Nations Mocada Museum CCCADA Art Institutes in New York City and Brooklyn. Jrenee’s work is in the permanent collections of the Southern University of Louisiana in Baton Rouge SUMA Museum, the W.E.B.DuBois Museum in Ghana and the McKenna Museum of African American art. She was selected and participated in the S.C. 2011 Biennial, the first 2013 Artfields and 2018 Artfields in Lake City, SC.