Jessica Lynne is a writer, art critic, podcaster, editor, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism that centers Black perspectives while engaging the contemporary art world. She is a winner of a 2025 Rabkin Prize. You can read her full bio at our website.
We invited Jessica to have a conversation about her work. The interview is accompanied by a newly commissioned portrait of Jessica in her studio during a residency at ALMA | LEWIS, an art platform for critical thinking, constructive dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black cultures in Pittsburgh.
Please note: Jessica is no longer at Momus, a change that occurred after our podcast was produced.
The interview has been gently edited for length and clarity.
Mentioned in this episode:
Educator, artist, and architect Amaza Lee Meredith
Art on My Mind by bell hooks (The New Press, 1995)
Writer and curator Taylor Aldridge
Poet June Jordan
Writer Toni Cade Bambara
”Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” by Barbara Smith (Center for Critical Education Inc., 1978)
Writer Greg Tate
Writer Joan Morgan
Writer Camille Bacon
Artist Chloe Bass
Negroland by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon, 2015)
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon, 2022)
Writer Randall Kenan
Bisi Silva, founder and curator of Contemporary Art CCA, Lagos, Nigeria
The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property by Eunsong Kim (Duke University Press, 2024)
This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The interview was conducted by Mary Louise Schumacher, a journalist and the executive director of the Rabkin Foundation. The portraits were made by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. The production team for the Rabkin Interviews also includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer; Johnathon Olsen, editor; with research and copyediting by Katie Avila Loughmiller and Karen Samelson. Music is by Flint, HaHaHa, Ori Kaplan and Jimit. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners.
