Jessica Monette: Root Me in the Soil

Root Me in the Soil, In the Wake and the Becoming immerses viewers in a shifting landscape of memory, resilience, and transformation. Through paintings, sculptures, and installations—some of which will rotate during the exhibition—the work unfolds in layers, much like the histories it reflects.

At its center is New Orleans; a city of deep beauty and creativity yet also a place where the enduring structures of inequality have long shaped everyday life. Hurricane Katrina, while often remembered as a singular disaster, revealed these truths with startling clarity and by doing so cast a spotlight on systems and attitudes toward Black communities that extend far beyond the Gulf Coast.

Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the exhibition moves between figurative portraits, abstract compositions, and immersive environments echoing processes of “being” and “becoming.” Rope, soil, cloth, and painted surfaces form a tactile language that hints at both rupture and renewal.

This project invites viewers to consider the histories honored and those that remain forgotten. Here, memory is more than preservation it is an active force resisting erasure and carrying the seeds of possible futures.

Marking the 20th year since Hurricane Katrina, this exhibition stands as an ode to the lives, histories, and enduring spirit of the communities forever changed by its waters.

The Project Room series is organized by Ennis, Baines, and Sicat.

^{Pictured: Jessica Monette.}

Jessica Monette b.1986, is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area, originally from New Orleans. Her work explores Black memory, ancestral lineage, and the relationship between place and inheritance. Moving fluidly between painting, sculpture, and installation, she uses found materials, personal archives, and site-based research to trace familial histories and reconstruct what has been lost through displacement, migration, and environmental trauma. Monette’s practice draws from her family’s lived experience, particularly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and is grounded in a broader investigation of Black diasporic continuity. Recent works incorporate soil, rope, and architectural fragments, transforming quotidian materials into vessels of cultural and emotional resonance.

Her first solo exhibition, Unveiling Histories: A Fabricated Archive, was presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. Her upcoming exhibition at the de Saisset Museum marks her second solo show, continuing her inquiry into land, legacy, and speculative memory through photographic documentation, oral history, and embodied presence. She holds an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and currently teaches at Stanford University.