Age: 22 • Lives and creates: Cleveland and Silver Spring, Md.• Learned: BFA in Painting from Cleveland Institute of Art
Using enticing, bright colors, Janoi Daley’s paintings consider the in-between space of living within multiple identities and cultures. As a Jamaican-American woman, her artwork reflects on her experiences and those who came before her.
“I’d say that my work is unraveling simultaneously to my existence,” she says. “I’m usually painting something that I’m thinking about or something that’s happened.”
Born in Jamaica, Daley and her mother moved to Maryland when she was 10 years old to live near family who had moved there in the early 2000s. While she did ballet as a young child, in Maryland, Daley became interested in visual art and attended a magnet high school to pursue it.
She learned about the Cleveland Institute of Art through college recruiters, and although she applied to about 10 colleges, CIA was the only one she had the opportunity to visit before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she says. It made CIA an easy choice.
Starting as a graphic design major, she quickly switched to painting – a medium for which she’d long had a passion. She also picked up a creative writing minor after taking a poetry class and a post-apocalyptic writing class.
Left: “Ascension” (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches. Top: “Rejoice” (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches. Bottom: “Follow the Light” (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches. Photos courtesy of the artist.
Bright, bold colors play a big role in Daley’s art, which she calls “fantasy world-building, figurative work.”
“I like to call it very enticing, like it has this sexy aura to it,” she says. “It draws you in because of how bright the colors are,” adding she then wants viewers to be gripped by what the figures are doing in the paintings.
Daley’s process starts with an idea for “how I can make the work very bizarre, or figures doing weird things,” and she also considers their environment, she says. She uses a fluorescent acrylic color – like pink or chartreuse – as the base, then uses oil for her subjects and the majority of the painting. Her method of using acrylic as a base allows her to build especially luscious colors.
“I’ll restart multiple times in my paintings, and that scaffolding is usually shown in certain parts of the paintings after I’m finished – I don’t necessarily cover up my mistakes,” she says, adding she’ll sit for hours and paint, trying to feel what it’s like to be in the piece.
“A Performance” (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 30 inches. Photo courtesy of Janoi Daley.
The results are exciting and easily capture a viewer’s attention, allowing you to consider who the people she creates in the paintings might be. She’ll often consider religion and how people – especially women in the cultures she’s part of – navigate identity and hardships in her pieces. While her work may reference and represent herself and women in her family, the subjects themselves aren’t any one real person, she says.
“My work is mainly about identity and culture, and this in-between space where I’m American, but I’m also Jamaican,” she says, “and that feeling of otherness in certain spaces. … As well as being a Black woman, and being Black and also a woman, and how those two things are inseparable and how one can be more dominant than the other at certain times.”
In the spring, her Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibition, “Love, Death, God.,” used the CIA gallery space to create a vibrant experience for visitors. The walls were painted a deep bluish purple, and spotlights covered in fluorescent gels shined onto her artwork. Harsh violin music playing and a book of poems she wrote to explain the paintings helped create a scenario where viewers could “slip into” them, she says.
Daley also had two related solo exhibits at Karamu House in Cleveland and CIA in 2023, both reflecting on motherhood and her community of women. They also served to debunk “this idea of strong Black women and how I’ve been brought up by hyper-independent women – that wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to embody because I think I had to learn … allowing people in and vulnerability,” she recalls.
Left: “Cooking for my Nine-Nite (funeral)” (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 40 inches. Right: “Wedding Portrait” (2024). Oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches. Photos courtesy of the artist.
After graduating from CIA this past spring, Daley is taking advantage of a slower period outside of school, spending more time ideating, sketching and building toward her next body of work. She also has work on view in a Pittsburgh group exhibit through Dec. 28.
Daley says as a young artist, she struggles with everything she doesn’t know. She enjoys learning about art history and fashion, and wants to make related historical and symbolic references in her work. She has to continue to learn to incorporate new references, she tells Canvas via Zoom from Silver Spring, Maryland, where she’s staying with her family for a few months before returning to Cleveland.
She notes her “Wedding Portrait” painting and how during its creation, Daley thought about the “Arnolfini Portrait” by painter Jan van Eyck in 1434, also portraying a couple. Much curiosity still surrounds the Arnolfini piece and its symbolism has been heavily analyzed. That’s the kind of conversation she hopes her own work might create.
“I just love that there are so many different conversations happening with one piece, and I think a lot about how do I connect my culture and my language and my experience to something that is also so broad, and (to) historical canons and symbolism,” she says.
– Amanda Koehn
WHAT OTHERS SAY
“Janoi was an incredible student and is an incredible artist. She is able to distill a lived experience into a kind of poetry that eludes most. Her work is dreamlike and honest and causes a viewer to confront their own questions of reality. What Janoi brings to our creative community is an energetic and dauntless spirit. As an artist, her vision is profound and undeniable. As a community member, she is clear-eyed and indefatigable; deeply committed and caring. We’re pretty lucky to have her.”
Lane Cooper, professor of painting, Cleveland Institute of Art
