HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) - On June 20 – John “Jahni” Moore’s birthday – the ARtEvolution project was unveiled in Huntsville, the place where he was born and raised, where he went to college and became an artist and art teacher. Jahni the Artist, as he’s known, had recruited 16 other artists to participate in the project as a reaction to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
The art installation, in which each artist painted a 4-by-8-foot framed wooden panel, was conceived and executed in less than a week before it was displayed on Clinton Avenue at Woodlawn Street in downtown Huntsville.
“When this opportunity came up, it had to happen,” Jahni says. “This project appeared at a time when it’s most needed.”
Though the artists were paid, most of them donated the money they received, he says. Dozens of people showed up to help put the panels up, and passersby honked and waved. At the time, Jahni remembers thinking, “This is what America should look like.” His involvement renewed his faith in humanity and his sense of connection with others.
In a Facebook post, he described the project’s profound impact: “With each conversation, stake driven, point expressed, blister, fist bumped, laughter heard, brow wiped, hammer blow, and art erected to stand and shout beyond silence, I imagined the America that resided in my six-year-old mind that pored through books in Rolling Hills Elementary School Library and dreamed what I could be.”
That little boy spent much of his childhood in church with his family. “Every time the church doors opened, we were behind them,” he says. “As a child, that was our social life, spiritual life and extended family. Having that base established taught me so much.”
Sitting in the pews, Jahni would sketch the back of his fellow parishioners’ heads.
His first portrait was one he drew of his sister, he says, recalling her round head and braids on both sides. In school, “art was something I loved doing.” He looked forward to the once-a-week classes and says he always felt proud when he saw his artwork displayed.
“I felt that mine stood out on the wall,” he says. “That was my language. I became known as ‘the boy who could draw.’”
He also became fascinated by nature at an early age, memorizing the scientific names for all the animals in Alabama. “I felt more akin to nature than I did to humanity,” he says. Connecting with nature was “my communion time. I never saw a separation between nature and God.”
Through church, he joined the Pathfinders youth group when he was 10 years old – an association that made a lifelong impact. Being in the woods, he says, “I was home. The group set a path for me.”
ON THE RIGHT PATH
Today, he still considers himself a “pathfinder,” always searching for a better place for himself and others. In his work, he has played with the concept of finding pathways – like he does with the gold line that often appears to connect people of color to their rich past.
With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from Alabama A&M University, Jahni has worked as an art instructor for years, teaching from kindergarten to the college level, while maintaining a busy schedule as a prolific artist. When he “got to a place with art where I wanted to go deeper,” he went to The Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned an MFA in studio arts in 2019.
“They made me question everything,” he says. “I liked those deep waters.”
The “deep waters” are philosophically bottomless. He learned to tap into our “collective self-conscience, to the basis of what every soul is,” he says. “I began to see things from the other side of my own vision, which opened a deeper appreciation of people.”
His public work is well known in Huntsville, where his first mural is still on exhibit at EarlyWorks Children’s Museum. His alma mater, Alabama A&M, has a dozen others. One of his most well-known pieces, the “Space Is Our Place” mural at Campus 805 on the side of the Straight to Ale building, was painted in 2018. A Google Fiber commission, it was recognized in “Parade” magazine as the best mural in Alabama in 2019. He has also painted murals in Chicago, Seattle and South America.
“There’s something about murals,” he says. “They’re art for everyday people, in the space where you live and walk and work. I think art that lives among people has a more powerful function.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jahni has been spending a lot more time at home and outside in nature. He hasn’t traveled in six months, he has no upcoming shows and his full-time job as an art teacher at Lee High School Magnet Program is virtual right now. He has had the time to rediscover “the love of putting marks on paper” that he first felt as a child.
He shares his passion for art with his high school students, but he teaches them much more than just color theory and composition. It’s the life lessons that remain with them, even if they don’t go on to become artists – and he knows that’s true because so many students stay in touch with him after high school.
“I tell my freshmen when they get here, ‘You’ve found your tribe,’” he says. Using pop culture references they can relate to, he compares himself to Professor X, the founder of the X-Men, or Morpheus from “The Matrix.” “What resonates with you, I want to tap into and help to wake it up,” he tells them. “When we tap into that space, we have great reverence for life. It’s what I want for myself, and it’s what I want for you.”
The spiritual side of Jahni the Artist is rooted in those childhood churchgoing experiences. It’s only fitting that he’s spent nearly a year renovating a vacant church, the former Victory Bible Fellowship, into his new art studio where he hopes to teach art to students of all ages as he continues to do his own work.
His new church studio will enable him to “not just tell students what’s possible from the safety of a classroom, but to show them in the real, walking world,” he says.
“I like the feeling of heading to ‘the church,’” he said, but now as a grown man, an accomplished artist who has found his calling in life. This church will be a place where the acronym he created for the word “art” – “A Resurrecting Truth” – will be within reach.
“I truly believe art can resurrect our humanity,” he says.
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