Yazz Atmore

Artist Profile: Yazz Atmore

Spirit Visions

By Raymundo Muñoz

Denver artist Yazz Atmore—a.k.a. “Chatty Ancestors”—creates collage-based works, murals, and installations inspired by her personal connection to the spirit world, ancestral wisdom, and the young people and community she engages with. I interviewed her in her studio recently at RedLine Contemporary Art Center about her artwork, background, and the guiding forces in her life. Her responses are reflected in this profile.

Coming from a long line of teachers, Atmore has been an educator for over ten years, frequently working with high-risk youths in the Denver area. Growing up Black in a single-parent household in Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, Atmore relates that she was labeled a high-risk youth herself, so she understands the environment and challenges such young people face.

Yazz Atmore, As Above, So Below, 2021, mixed media 2-D and 3-D installation, 10 x 11 feet. Image by DARIA.

Lucky for her, the Boys and Girls Club kept her out of trouble and off the streets while offering opportunities to focus her energy in positive ways, including art-making and leadership development. “I was always being poured into, loved on,” she says. Never a “traditional girly,” Atmore received her BA from Metropolitan State University, and created her own art-related degree, “Supporting High-Risk Youth,” a combination of art, language, culture, and business classes more in tune with her background and interests than a traditional degree program.

Atmore became a collage artist almost accidentally and out of necessity. While working as a middle school art teacher, she was required to produce a portfolio to retain her employment. A kind supervisor gave her support and a big box of collage art supplies. Racing to meet her deadline, she created a body of work in a frenzy and kept her job. With the new pieces, Atmore applied to be in a Black History Month art exhibition she found on Instagram. She sold every piece in the show.

Soon after, a window mural gig led to an inspiring and informative collaboration with wheat paste muralist Koko Bayer for the Babe Walls 2021 mural festival (see: Sub “Urban” Field Trip), which led to more murals, art shows, and pop-ups. By the summer of 2021, encouraged by the steady string of successes, Atmore became a full-time artist.

A portrait of the artist Yazz Atmore in her studio at RedLine Contemporary Art Center. Image by Raymundo Muñoz.

Atmore’s vivid mixed-media collages combine both analog and digital elements, largely based on portraits she cuts up by hand and using a Cricut Cutter. She then fills and surrounds them with natural forms such as plants and animals. These dynamic compositions suggest a narrative made up of an otherworldly and often ebullient cast of human characters—each with their own story to tell. Printed on large pieces of paper and glued together with wallpaper adhesive, Atmore’s designs cover indoor and outdoor walls as well, creating big and funky visual installations.

Self-described as an expressionist intuitive, Atmore’s process rarely involves planning. Instead, she relies on her intense creative energy and is driven by the visions in her head. Those visions often come from her conversations with the dead—her own ancestors, specifically. “I work with and honor my dead [...] this is literally how I see them in my spirit world.” By her own admission, the artist has seen and had contact with dead people since she was thirteen. The initial experience was traumatizing, but over time she’s come to regard this ability as a gift to share. Atmore hopes her work inspires interactions with viewers’ internal and external spirits, but how they ultimately relate to her work, she states, is “between them and the divine.”

Yazz Atmore, Lilith’s Shadow, 2021, collage, crushed glass, and glitter on wooden panel, 24 x 12 inches. Image by Raymundo Muñoz.

Atmore’s interest in spirituality developed through a combination of experiences. Growing up in a Baptist church, her traditional Christian upbringing has since given way to a more expansive connection to God, Goddess, or the Universe that is informed by traditional African religions and practices as well as Hoodoo (a form of African folk magic). As the artist notes, in such belief systems, the elevated and honorable dead are part of one’s spirit team. They are a kind of guiding and supportive collection of spirits, which includes, as Atmore shares, “The ones I’ve never met, and ones I do know, that have the highest good for me.” Atmore’s connection to her own talkative spirit team is so powerful and so connected to her own art practice that she honors them, appropriately, with her artist moniker Chatty Ancestors.  

As chatty as her ancestors might be, Atmore certainly carries on the family tradition by speaking in an easygoing and confident manner. Over the past couple of years, being at the same RedLine satellite studios with her and subsequently in the same RedLine resident artist cohort, I’ve had many opportunities to chat with Atmore about art, business, and being good to oneself. As much wisdom and best practices advice as she offers, though, Atmore is all ears when hearing others’ stories and lessons.

Yazz Atmore, Zelma Irene Ray, 2021, collage on wooden panel, 10 x 10 inches. Image by Raymundo Muñoz.

In her Women We Call Home series, for instance, Atmore interviewed friends about important and honorable Black women in their lives. Based on their responses, the artist created collage pieces using photos of the honored women as central elements, adorned by flora, fauna, and other imagery.

The first in the series, Zelma Irene Ray, honors her grandmother—a key figure in Atmore’s personal and artistic life. The last in the series is also named Irene, which is also Atmore’s middle name meaning “peace.” According to the artist, the use of the name is no coincidence. Created as a way of processing her grief over the death of her grandmother, the series helped bring her peace. She relates, “My grandma was my peace, and I am my own peace now.” Indeed, there is a calmness and happiness that comes across the works, composed with beaming faces, blooming flowers, and shining gold accents.

Deeply personal for herself and her interviewees, this is a traveling series that she’s happy to share and talk about. As much of a businesswoman as she considers herself, however, selling these works is out of the question. She feels that “artists need to keep some work for themselves.”

Yazz Atmore, Mutual Butterflies, 2021, collage on wooden panel, 12 x 24 inches. Image by Raymundo Muñoz.

Not all of Atmore’s work is light, airy, and easy to share, though. Darker themes rule in works like Lilith’s Shadow, Mutual Butterflies, and Phoenix.

Lilith’s Shadow is about coming to grips with her unique and emotionally exhausting gift of communing with the dead. In this piece based on the myth of Lilith—Adam’s first wife, who was cursed to live forever and see all her children die—Atmore’s central character is decapitated and surrounded by symbols of death (skulls, skeletons, and black butterflies) that are balanced around and through her eyes. It’s a chilling piece, made particularly poignant by a few small green leaves among dark roses.

While not quite as dark, Phoenix and Mutual Butterflies are just as heavy, personal, and emotionally wrenching. Both pieces deal with heartbreak. Mutual Butterflies is a “love story of two egos,” presented as two mirrored figures with their faces detached and floating amid a swirl of butterflies. The collage is lovely and captivating in composition, but the faces don’t meet eye to eye—neither do their lips touch—suggesting a romantic separation.

Thanks to a similar color palette and moon imagery, Phoenix makes a powerful visual and conceptual companion piece to Lilith’s Shadow. Where the latter deals with death in the literal sense, the former is based on the death of a relationship (which was happening as the artist created the piece). From the ashes, though, comes rebirth, represented as the mythic bird (combined with a white butterfly, in this case) rising from the ashes along with verdant leaves that intimate growth and renewal.

Yazz Atmore, Phoenix, 2021, collage, crushed glass, glitter, resin, and crystals on wooden panel, 26 x 28 inches. Image by Raymundo Muñoz.

Opportunities for growth and exploration are ever on Atmore’s horizon, whether that involves using more digital design tools and techniques, getting the most out of her “life-changing” RedLine artist residency, making her installations more immersive with flowing floral arrangements, or finding more ways to connect with her community and younger generations. She is continually inspired by the “spirit [and] authenticity” of the youths she teaches and by her mentors who remind her not to “let this world harden you, don’t let it tell you who you are. Remember why you’re here.” It seems Atmore is certainly here to give voice to her ancestors with visionary and inspiring artworks, acting as a “vessel and tool.” Atmore muses, “I feel like I have an old soul, but a young spirit.”

You can see Atmore's work in the upcoming group exhibition Home Dreams: The ache lives in all of us: Annual RedLine Resident Artist Exhibition at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, which opens on January 27 and is on view through March 10.

Raymundo Muñoz (he/him) is a Denver-based printmaker and photographer. He is a current artist-in-residence at RedLine Contemporary Art Center and director/co-curator of Alto Gallery. Ray is guided by the principle that art is a bridge, and it connects us to ourselves and each other across time and space.