Learn how Santa Fe artist Jacks McNamara mines their emotional and spiritual connection to their lost lineage through artistic practice in their solo show Ancestral Imagination.
Jacks McNamara is a queer, trans, neurodivergent artist, writer, organizer and educator working at the intersection of healing and social justice. Their visual art is informed by their parallel practice as a poet, and is deeply shaped by their experiences of synesthesia, their passion for plants, their astonishment at New Mexico landscapes and their investigations of pre-Christian spirituality in ancestral European homelands. Jacks is a Lambda Literary Fellow with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. They learned the foundations of painting at the Aegean School for the Fine Arts in Paros, Greece. Their work has been shown across the US and Canada, in venues ranging from Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet to New York’s Fountain Gallery. Jacks is the co-founder of The Icarus Project, a participatory adventure in radical mental health and mutual aid now known as The Fireweed Collective, and co-author of Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness. They are the creator of many zines and a collection of poetry, Inbetweenland, which was released by Deviant Type Press in 2013. Jacks’ advocacy and art are the subject of the poetic documentary Crooked Beauty. Jacks also teaches The Big Queer Poetry Class, writes regular columns for the Santa Fe Reporter, and hosts the podcast So Many Wings
