About

New York City-based artist Erica Jones creates work that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, exploring universal themes of stoicism, joy, and grief through her encounters with people across different cultures and environments. Her art draws inspiration from the symbolic patterns found in textiles worldwide and celebrates the resilience of working women—a theme rooted deeply in her own family history.

Erica's grandmother, a first-generation Polish seamstress and eldest of eight children, worked in garment factories from age thirteen to support her younger siblings in Jersey City, New Jersey. These family stories, combined with memories of watching her grandmother create on her Singer sewing machine, planted the seeds for Erica's lifelong fascination with women's work, craft, and identity that extends far beyond their labor.

Through her travels and teaching experiences, particularly her time in Cameroon, West Africa, Erica has observed the common threads that connect working women across cultures. Her art serves as a bridge between worlds, offering her perspective as an outsider looking in with deep respect and genuine curiosity about the strength and beauty she witnesses in women's daily experiences and their relationships with their surroundings.

In 2024, Erica began incorporating embroidery into her practice while processing her mother's passing, finding in this ancient craft both a connection to her heritage and a means of expressing her inner landscape. This personal journey with thread and needle has become another way she honors the tradition of women's work while telling her own story of grief and healing.

Erica graduated with a BFA in Illustration from Parsons The New School for Design in 2007, having also studied painting at Lorenzo De' Medici in Florence, Italy. After graduation, she founded an after-school mural program for inner-city youth in her hometown of Asbury Park, New Jersey, before earning her Masters in the Arts of Teaching from Monmouth University in 2011.

Her commitment to art as a tool for community building led her to Cameroon, where she served as Art Director at the American School of Yaoundé and implemented "The Meaningful Mural Project" at Foyer de l'Espérance Orphanage, teaching students to create public art that speaks to their community. Currently, Erica teaches visual arts at The Willis Avenue School, working with students in the South Bronx while continuing to develop her own artistic practice.

To contact erica for commissions, exhibitions or sales

 email: EricaJonesArt@gmail.com