Artist aims to foster dialogue to build bridges

By Catherine Ferguson SNJM

At the 2026 Eastern Washington Legislative Conference (EWLC), Shantell Jackson, a community organizer at the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane (PJALS), led a workshop titled "Art as Liberation" to explore the intersection of art, healing and activism.

In reality, the title of the workshop reflects the flow of her life journey much more than her job title at PJALS.

"I am creative and expressive. I have been that way ever since I was little. I embody what I feel," she said. "My family worshipped in a tight Black Church community with many ministries. The Black Church was a space of healing."

As long as Shantell can remember, being creative was in her bones and largely self-taught. She has expressed herself in many forms—singing Christian songs, writing poetry and creating visual arts with acrylics, watercolor and ink.

"I tried oils, but I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to dry before wanting to do more," she explained.

Shantell grew up in the predominantly Black community on the east side of Buffalo, N.Y. An only child, she was raised by a village. The close community there and a large extended family with 50 first cousins, and nine aunts and uncles still have an impact on her, even though she now resides in Spokane.

Her activism also has roots in what happens in Buffalo.

She vividly recalls the traumatic event in 2022 when there was a mass shooting at the Tops Market in the community where she grew up.

"It was a big deal to have a chain grocery store in a Black neighborhood, and my community shopped there," Shantell said.

In 2022, apparently having planned the attack for months, an 18-year-old white supremacist from a town a three-hour drive away came to the store and shot 13 people. Ten died. Eleven of the victims were Black and two were white. That grocery store continues, but the trauma caused is still part of the everyday experience of shopping there.

It also remains part of Shantell's vision of "artivism" as not only protest but also healing, empowerment and resistance.

In her EWLC workshop, she described what activism means to her.

"Activism is central to caring about having a good life. It happens out of a vision of a world community and doing something to make the world a better place," she said.

For her, it is acting to disrupt harmful systems that combine prejudice with institutional power.

In her life, art is key to activism and a path to the healing necessary for liberation.

"Healing is not ignoring the past and expecting to arrive at liberation," she explained.

With that as background, Shantell asked the participants in the EWLC workshop to form small groups of two or three to share their experiences on the truth she had shared.

"What are two places of healing ground for you?" she asked.

In her own life, her art—in whatever medium—flowed out of her experiences into her creative expression. It has become healing ground that has further impelled her to create art.

Although Shantell always thought of herself as creative, she didn't always envision herself working as a creative, in spite of her growing love of expressing herself through poetry, art and music.

She remembers that her mother had her do projects during summer vacations. One of those projects introduced her to Langston Hughes, a poet-novelist-playwright-columnist leader in the Harlem Renaissance.

Shantell fell in love with poetry.

During her school years, she considered herself an okay student. At one point she thought she might even go into the military.

In high school, Shantell tried an art class to learn more art techniques.

"I hated that class. They tried to tell me how to do art," she commented, explaining how she has resisted formal art classes, except to learn a new technique like how to do a digital graphic.

After high school, she attended Keuka College in upstate New York, where she studied political science and history with plans of becoming a lawyer.

"I had fun in college. I enjoyed the social life more than the classes, but I was practical, too, and I wanted to be able to pay the bills," she said.

Shantell graduated in 2004 and by November 2004 had found a job as a hall director at Eastern Washington University (EWU), so she left her tight-knit community in Buffalo and came out west.

She worked at EWU for about 15 years in their residential life program, student leadership and as an activist in residence. During that time, she focused on academic and multicultural programming and created programs to help students understand themselves and others.

Meanwhile, her desire to focus on an art career was growing, and she left EWU in February 2020. That year, she collaborated with 16 other artists to paint the "K" in the Black Lives Matter Mural at 244 W. Main in downtown Spokane.

By October 2021, she and another local artist, Tracy Poindexter-Canton, presented a joint multimedia exhibition at the Terrain Gallery called "Her Words to Life," which featured visual art inspired by Black American literary prose from women like American novelist Toni Morrison.

At the same time, she became the program director for Spokane Arts, a curatorial role to support the artistic scene in other than monetary ways.

"It's the perfect landing spot for someone with a multidisciplinary approach to art," Shantell pointed out.

Focusing on her art career led to several joint exhibitions.

In January 2023, her art was featured in a show called "Colors of Life" at the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle and a show called "Nightwatch" at Gallery One in Bellingham.

The descriptions of Shantell's work often refer to her as a multidisciplinary artist who creates in process, each piece or creative journey starting internally and flowing outward to result in colorful, rhythmic, textural work.

Her installations and performance art pieces explore the human condition by embodying feelings in her work.

In the winter of 2024, her career added another dimension when she joined PJALS as a community organizer.

There she has responsibilities to coordinate events, provide training and help lead the youth activist leadership program.

In all her work, Shantell is first of all a multidisciplinary artist, as she says, "a vessel to the work," aiming to foster dialogue across differences to build bridges, promote acceptance and encourage healing.

In her vision for her future, she would like to develop a small creative enterprise to provide liberating and healing experiences through art—perhaps traveling in a bus with an Art Space.

At the moment, Shantell has developed the beginning stages of this dream, which she shares in a workshop.

For information, email sjackson@pjals.org.