Jess Atieno

Mixed Media Artist

2025 3Arts Awards

Visual Arts

Jess Atieno’s (she/her) practice engages African modernisms and visual culture through a postcolonial lens, critically examining the enduring imprint of colonial photographic practices on representations of place, home, and identity. Her research interrogates historic images, attending to their spectral presence and the ways they mediate memory, belonging, and dispossession. Guided by artistic gestures that center decolonized interpretations of history, Atieno makes time travels through history’s material remains such as photographs, maps, and documents, incorporating them into the making of large screen prints and intricate woven tapestries. These acts of remediation do not merely reproduce these images but reanimate them, unsettling their fixity and opening them to new possibilities of meaning. Atieno employs collage, fragmentation, and material manipulation as strategies to destabilize the photographic field, positioning her work sites of intervention. By engaging the screen print halftone and weaving binary code as visual registers, she constructs nuanced poetic narratives that resist the totalizing gaze of colonial photography. This process unfolds through a haptic collaboration between her body, the silk screen, and the loom— an embodied, multisensory negotiation that challenges the colonial logics of visibility and representation, ultimately proposing alternative ways of seeing and knowing.

Atieno holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an alum of Asiko Art School. Her work has been shown in Kenya and internationally, most notably at Bamako Biennial (2022), Lagos Biennial (2019), Savvy Contemporary in Berlin (2023), The Armory Show in New York (2023) and in Femmes, a group exhibition curated by Pharrell Williams at Perrotin in Paris (2025). She has also been awarded grants and residencies including a grant from the Abakanowikz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation and the first recipient of the Bisi Silva grant. She has been a resident at various art centers including the Hyde Park Art Center's Jackman Goldwasser Residency and at Arts and Public Life (2023). Her work has been collected at prestigious collections such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Alfred Taubman Foundation, Africana Art Foundation, KADIST Collection, and the Red Hill Art Gallery Collection. Atieno is also the founder of Nairobi Print Project, a platform dedicated to scholarly research and conversation on contemporary art and curatorial practice in Africa and the Black diaspora.

Jess Atieno's Website