About The Artist

Botini, born Jabriel Davis in Valdosta, Georgia, is a self-taught painter and cultural worker whose practice preserves and elevates the lived experiences of Black families across the rural and urban South. Working primarily in acrylic, Botini is known for her large-scale portraiture, haunting grayscale palettes, and narrative compositions that merge personal memory with collective history. Her work explores themes of Black womanhood, survival, grief, spiritual inheritance, and the ritual knowledge carried through generations.

In 2025, Botini earned Best in Show at the Southwest Georgia Regional Fine Arts Juried Exhibit hosted by the Albany Area Arts Council for her painting Reborn. She later received Second Place in Two-Dimensional Works at the Syd Blackmar Juried Exhibit during Tifton’s Arts Affair Juried Exhibition. Her paintings have been featured in juried exhibitions, community-centered showcases, and regional touring collections, including Reimagine, a multi-site exhibition highlighting artists from the Georgia State Collection.

Beyond her studio practice, Botini is the founder of the Fawohodie Cultural Sustainability Center, a nonprofit dedicated to reclaiming ancestral knowledge through art, food, land, and community. As an artist, mother, and cultural steward, Botini’s work functions as testimony and tribute; an act of remembrance and a call toward collective liberation.

Artist’s Statement

We Be the Blues is a visual hymn to the legacy, love, and labor of Black families in the American South. It is a meditation on our everyday lives; the wash on the line, the whispers of Papa’s harmonica, the joy of long dirt roads, and how these ordinary gestures hold extraordinary beauty, history, and endurance. Through hues of blue, I honor not only the emotional depth of the blues as a sound and a feeling, but also the sacred resonance of indigo, its spiritual weight, its economic exploitation, and its role in shaping both our suffering and our survival.

The color blue, for me, is both wound and balm. It tells stories of toil and tenderness, of what was taken and what could never be stripped away: our grace, our rhythm, our regality. Each painting carries traces of those who came before, archival echoes, ancestral whispers, and the unspoken blues of generations.

As a self-taught artist born of Southern soil, I paint with memory as my compass. My brushwork moves like a field holler or ring shout; layered, circular, improvisational, blurring the lines between the spiritual and the domestic, the historical and the personal. I want viewers to walk through this body of work as if walking through a family album or a Sunday sermon, feeling both the ache and the hallelujah of what it means to be Black and alive in the South.

We Be the Blues is not simply an exhibition; it is a call to remember. It asks us to see ourselves and our ancestors not in tragedy, but in transcendence; to witness how we, the descendants, have become the very song our forebears once sang.

By Botini (Jabriel Davis)