How Art Helped Luna Jay Stay Grounded Through Chaos and Change

For our Women in Arts interview series, we spoke with Luna Jay Yvelisse, a multidisciplinary Nuyorican artist, mother, and priestess whose work spans painting, digital illustration, and collage. In this conversation, Luna opens up about how her art has always been a way to survive, process, and speak back to the world. She shares what it was like growing up in a working-class Puerto Rican household in New York, and how art became her first language when there weren’t many safe spaces for expression.

Throughout the interview, Luna walks us through the ups and downs of her journey, from drawing secretly as a child to curating her first solo show while working a security job. She speaks about motherhood, making space for creativity in hard times, and how she tunes into her body and spirit when creating. We learn how she navigates fatigue, grief, joy, and rage, letting all of it shape her work.

Luna Jay Yvelisse

My name is Luna Jay Yvelisse. I am a multidisciplinary Nuyorican Artist, Priestess, and Mother. I am a Native New Yorker, born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn and raised in Williamsburg/Bushwick, and Ridgewood. My work encompasses visual storytelling, spirituality, shadow work, rage, community, and healing. I express and create by painting, sketching, digital illustration, and collage work—each chosen intuitively to serve the message and spirit of the piece. As a second-generation Caribbean American navigating displacement, poverty, womanhood, motherhood, and systemic oppression, my creations have been both an altar and an archive: sacred offerings that honor survival, femininity, resistance, and ancestral memory.

My creative philosophy is rooted in radical reclamation so I center the voices of the marginalized—particularly Black and Indigenous Caribbean women. I face colonial beauty standards, bodily autonomy, erasure, feminine rage, shadow work, and the patriarchy. So each piece I make becomes a ritual of reclaiming autonomy, exploring womanhood and femininity through Afro-Indigenous Caribbean spirituality, ancestral deities, astrology, and cultural references. My collections—Boricua, Goddesses, and Women Are God—form a living cosmology of existence, power, survival, autonomy, femininity, and joy. The inspiration is from lived experiences, activism, dreams, folklore, and the spiritual realm. My work is resistance, my love language, and my legacy.

1. How did you get started in your art career?

I’ve been creating since I was a kiddo. It’s my first language. I was definitely the kid that secretly drew on walls, tables, anything, really—as long as I knew it wouldn’t be seen in plain sight. I definitely doodled and sketched everywhere in school especially in books. I would draw eyes and lips a lot. Art was just how I processed the world around me and survived it. Growing up in a poor, working class Puerto Rican household, there wasn’t always room for softness or self-expression, so I carved out that space with every stroke of a pencil, pen, or crayon.

My formal journey truly started when I attended the High School of Art & Design, where I studied everything from fashion illustration, cartooning to advertisement, and art history. It wasn’t just there that I realized art was something I loved, it was something I needed. I continued to create through major life transitions like motherhood, being homeless, going through and healing from violence—letting my work evolve with me. It was difficult as I entered my 20s because I felt deprived, and I was just too physically exhausted to create.

I felt this immense emptiness and sadness. However, I just did what I could. In 2015, I was invited to showcase my work at Princess Nokia’s “Young Girls” video release party, and in 2018, one of my pieces was chosen for a book called “The Ugly Fruit” by Alicia Maldonado. That same year, I curated my first solo show. It was so much work, and I was saving up from my security job—it was a personal retrospective that marked the beginning of my public art career. Since then, I’ve been committed to creating art that speaks a truth, a power, uplifts my community, and honors stories that haven’t been told.

Create even when you’re unsure. Don’t wait until everything feels perfect because that perfection isn’t realness, and it will rob you of the beauty in becoming.

Luna Jay Yvelisse
Luna Jay Yvelisse, Crowned by the Ocean, Marked by the Moon, Digital Illustration, Size: 4032 x 5032 px, Year: 2023

2. When you’re creating something new, what makes you pause and say, this is working?

That usually is a feeling, something visceral that happens in my body before I can even name. I often pause, or sometimes I rush, when I feel this pull—like my spirit and body are responding to the piece. It’s not about perfection or technique. The imperfections, the flaws within my work, are what make it unique anyway. It represents all my personalities. For me, it’s when the work starts speaking back to me, when I look at it and feel like it’s revealing something I didn’t even know I needed to say. Sometimes it’s a specific color choice, a certain placement, or the layers that just feel right—like it came through me rather than from me.

Other times, it’s when I look at the piece and feel uncomfortable or emotional, like, “Oh wow… I actually don’t like this.” That’s when I know it’s touching something I might be avoiding or still working through. It’s working when it feels honest, when I’ve made space for both beauty and discomfort to coexist. That’s when I know I’ve created something that holds power, even if it’s unfinished.

Luna Jay Yvelisse, A Body of Art, Digital Illustration, Size: 4032 x 5032 px, Year: 2023

3. How do you balance your personal life with your art career?

Well balance ain’t a straight line for me—it’s more like a rhythm I return to when I’ve drifted too far in one direction. As a mom, selling my behind to captialism, and as artist, my time and energy are constantly being pulled in different directions. It is hard to keep it up. There are seasons when I’m more focused on surviving, caretaking, family, community, being in love—and during those times, art became slower, or became an afterthought but it never fully stops. I create when I can, especially when I am in a good mood and everything in my life is going smoothly.

I remember the those days being a young mom sketching and painting while my child was asleep. Now I’ll do my art instead of going out. All it means now to me is just stepping back and allowing life itself to become the art, knowing that motherhood, grief, rage, and joy all feed my practice. I’ve learned to give myself grace. Balance for me isn’t about doing it all perfectly and having a set routine—it’s about honoring where I am and trusting that my art will meet me there.

Luna Jay Yvelisse, Caribene Queen, Digital Illustration, Size: 4032 x 5032 px, Year: 2023

4. How do you envision the future of your art and its impact on the world?

I envision my art continuing to serve as both a mirror and a portal for the right people, something that reflects truth, pain, rage, beauty, and power, while also guiding women toward healing and remembering who they are. I want my work to keep evolving, especially into the right spaces and finding the people who can truly appreciate it. I want them to look at my work and feel seen, to experience a breaking of silence, and a reconnection to ancestral memory but also invoke and confront whatever feeling comes to the surface.

In the future, I do see my work reaching more global audiences. That idea is a little scary—it feels like sharing pieces of a journal with the world. But I know it’s necessary. I don’t just want my work to exist in galleries; I want it to live in art classrooms where little girls learn about female artists and deities. I want it to exist in rituals, protests, archives, and spiritual spaces. So I’m currently working on creating an oracle deck built that is a digital collage. It combines visual storytelling, ancestral symbolism, and personal healing—so others can use it as a tool for their own self-discovery and liberation.

Ultimately, I hope my work continues to challenge dominant narratives, uplift the sacred within the everyday, and create a ripple effect that affirms women’s worth, rage, softness, and survival. I’m not just making art for art’s sake—I’m making it for those who come after me.

Balance ain’t a straight line for me—it’s more like a rhythm I return to when I’ve drifted too far in one direction.

Luna Jay Yvelisse
Luna Jay Yvelisse, Arawak, First Nations of the Caribbean, Digital Illustration, Size: 4032 x 5032 px, Year: 2021

5. What mediums and techniques do you primarily work with?

I primarily paint, sketch, and create digital illustrations using Procreate, along with collage work. I move between traditional and digital mediums depending on what the piece calls for emotionally or spiritually. I tend to work more digitally because I’m always on the go—I can’t carry my easel, paint, and brushes with me everywhere like I imagined and I miss painting! However, sometimes a piece needs the texture and rawness of acrylic or watercolor, (I don’t feel confident with oil) while other times I just see the vision that I can achieve through digital creation. My techniques are intuitive and ritualistic.

I gotta have the right music and incense going. I often begin with freeform sketching or look through symbolic imagery for inspiration and allow the process to guide me. I incorporate cultural motifs, sacred symbols, and ancestral references—and sometimes I intentionally leave parts unfinished or raw to reflect the reality of survival and imperfection. With digital collage, I do layer, and rearrange fragments of memory pulling from everything from spiritual iconography to pop culture to create something that feels deeply personal and communal at the same time. Whether I’m working digitally or traditionally, my process is always about channeling something bigger than me.

6. Do you have any parting words of wisdom for our readers or aspiring artists?

Create even when it hurts. Create even when you’re unsure. Don’t wait until everything feels perfect because that perfection isn’t realness, and it will rob you of the beauty in becoming. Your art doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to be palatable or easily explained. Make what feels true to you. Let your work be messy, emotional, sacred, angry, scary, or soft. Let it be whatever you need it to be. That is the power.

Honor you and your seasons. There will be times when you’re overflowing with ideas, and others where you feel completely empty. Both are part of the process. Rest is part of the work. Breaks and Blanks are part of the work. Most importantly, remember that your story matters. You are the altar. This is your archive. Make your work for the version of you that needed to see it years ago and trust that someone else needs it too.

Luna Jay Yvelisse, Gemini Goddess, Digital Illustration, Size: 4032 x 5032 px, Year: 2022

Luna Jay Yvelisse’s work is grounded in storytelling, memory, and survival. Through paint, collage, and digital tools, she creates pieces that honor womanhood, rage, softness, and ancestral memory. Her art serves as both a record and a ritual, something that grows alongside her life and gives space to emotions that are often left unspoken.

What we’ve learned from Luna’s journey is that creating can be an act of healing, of reclaiming what’s been lost, and of holding space for the stories that aren’t often heard. She shows us that art doesn’t have to be perfect to matter—it just has to be real.

To learn more about Luna, visit the links below.

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