Jessica Cross

The beauty of my journey through life as an artist is that my projects rarely reveal themselves until I am out there, in the streets, engaging with a community in its entirety. Engaging with the reality of a city or any space for that matter- its black, its white and its grey. At which point I am then confronted with an infinite spectrum of color which i interpret as the human experience.

People unveil their cities many secrets. They tell us tales of personal history, local perspectives past and present. They tell us where to find the soul, and most times it is composed of dark and light. But therein lies the binary of life. The two go hand in hand.  So what do I do? I can only attempt to bring light to dark, face the good with the bad, the beauty with the struggle and remind myself that one could not exist without the other. together, they are harmonious. 

The soul of the city will always be comprised of black white and grey. Always. Musicians, Artists, Poets and all those alike, bound to creativity, have a responsibility to share; our job is to work from the inside out; confronting this grey scale with splashes of color that inevitably remind people that our hearts are in fact red."  

Jessica Cross was born and raised in the Bay Area, California. Her passion for the arts was pursued throughout her education, a path which began at Marin Country Day School ('02) and carried her through to Marin Academy High School ('06) and moving on to study at Occidental College in Los Angeles. There she studied Critical Theory Social Justice with a double minor in Ethnomusicology and Fine Arts. Jessica participated in a year-long visiting students program at Howard University in Washington DC in 2008 and a semester abroad at the University of Cape Town in 2009 before graduating with her BA from Occidental in 2010.

Her career as a photographer began with a camera and an opportunity to experience something different.

Exhibited works include:

'Down These Streets: Cape Town's Backyard' Los Angeles 2010

'Mzansi Citizens of Soul' Sausalito, 2011

'Dusty Fingers', Cape Town, 2012

'one.word', Portola Valley, 2013

'Bodies on Wax' Cape Town 2014