From Canvas to Community: Jaya King Reflects Sacramento’s Essence in Her Art

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Jaya King is on stage at Beatnik Studios, wearing bright white socks over her tall black pole boots and a Michael Jackson-inspired fedora. The 43-year-old artist is nervous, but adrenaline takes over as she steps on stage and spins around on a static pole, surrounded by silks and aerial loops hanging from the ceiling. Other artists are roller-skating around the gallery and the DJ is playing the hottest music from the 80s to the 2000s. The room is roaring with applause as King seductively moves her body to “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. Her dad and his wife are in the audience cheering alongside her friends who’ve become family. She ends her routine with a standing ovation, of course.

The event is unlike any King has done before: a curated one-night-only exhibition featuring live pole dancing alongside a gallery showcasing her own artwork and pieces by other local artists. King started taking pole dancing classes in 2018 and wound up drawing inspiration from the class for her Encaustic Human Pole Series. Black-and-white and color stills of women posing upside down on poles and doing provocative, alluring acrobatics on the stage come to life in this series.

“Folks [tend to see the act of] pole dancing for exercise as perpetuating this stereotypical female objectification,” King says. “This was the first time in a very long time [I felt] sexy and attractive, like really falling back in love with me [and] doing crazy ass acrobatic stuff on the pole. It was empowering to me, for me.”

King poses in front of her artwork at Beatnik Studios art gallery in Sacramento. [Credit: Jaya King]

King’s murals have been popping up on walls all over Sacramento in an endearingly Banksy-esque way. Since moving to Oak Park eight years ago, she’s embedded herself within the fabric of the community. King collaborates with organizations, city and state agencies, and fellow artists to produce murals in underserved communities. Bright-colored paints in pinks, yellows, and greens are blasted across buildings throughout downtown Sacramento and neighboring areas, tagged with @ARTCHICKJAYA in the bottom-right corner. While painting murals across the city wasn’t her intention when she moved to Sacramento, her talent and tenacity has transformed her path in ways unimaginable, making Jaya King a household name in the Sacramento art community.

When she first moved to Sacramento, her art immediately went up in the windows of a local art supply shop–a spontaneous decision made after a chat with a store employee. Soon after, her first piece was purchased and she replaced it with more of her artwork. 

“When I say things happened fast, it was like unseeingly fast,” says King. She remembers being approached in 2018 by Nisa Hayden, then-gallery director of Beatnik Studios in Sacramento. Hayden had seen some of King’s artwork of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and invited her to do a show. “She was expecting me to follow suit of this nature-like, landscape, monochromatic work. So of course, plot twist. I create a body of work that is totally inspired by pole dancing,” says King, aware of her desire to avoid the expected. 

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King is quick to emphasize that she grew up in Palo Alto, California before the technology takeover in Silicon Valley. She credits her mother for encouraging her to take art classes as a kid when she was adamantly against it for fear of painting like everyone else. When King was 15- years-old, she remembers painting her first mural on a wall in her parent’s home and taking nude model-figure drawing classes with a friend at her local community center. 

“There was this compartmentalization and adrenaline rush of ‘I’m going to paint this nude male body of which I am not familiar with at this point in my life,’” says King. “But you’re looking at it almost like how a doctor would look at a patient. Everyone goes to work. We were in this adult environment where people were not being like high schoolers, so that was cool. I enjoyed that.”

She says she has always wanted to do art her way and steer clear of the traditional artist trajectory.

Before moving to Sacramento, King worked in retail while showcasing her early artwork throughout the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Much of this work features portraits with muted hues and gouache painting, a technique that uses opaque watercolor and pigments. 

On her website, King says gouache was the starting point for her, explaining her unique choice of medium and technique. “By painting on weathered scrap lumber, the portraits gain a unique ‘sculptural’ quality. These paintings brought out the narrative in my work which is still rooted in my pieces today.”

From there, the artist dove into encaustic painting, wielding hot melted beeswax to craft abstracts, cityscapes, body forms, and fauna on canvas. 

“I was building my private teaching practice. I was doing my studio practice, exploring a whole bunch of different mediums and styles,” says King of the beginning years of her art career. “[I was] like raccoon sees shiny object. Ooh, let me try that! Ooh, this is like my personality. Let me do an entire series on something like this.”

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In 2018, King moved her art from canvas to wall, painting her first mural after a local organization approached her with the project. She painted Guild Goddess on the brick edifice of the historic Guild Theater in Oak Park.

“I never thought of doing murals before. I had done little fun ones in my mom’s house when I was 14. I also did one for my friend’s nursery, but that was fun stuff,” says King. “This was like, serious— a whole other level. To my understanding, having something on a historic building, there’s hoops that you jump through with that so I [feel] having my piece up there is an important part of me in the community.”

King drew Guild Goddess freehand with chalk before painting over it with a monochromatic, limited color palette. She had initially planned to project the image onto the wall but when that didn’t work, she had to improvise. “I’m up on this scissor lift triangulating everything and using the building to be my point of reference to sketch the mural and then paint it,” King remembers. She only had about 10 days to bring her artwork to life. For reference, she used an image a friend took of her and tweaked it to imagine the art she wanted to create.

“I needed to get the right facial expression, the right feel, the right vibe, the right energy. I needed to have that look,” says King. “Because she has a big ass [a]fro [in the mural], I always get, ‘Is that Angela Davis?’ I’m like, ‘It is your Angela Davis. You see Angela Davis. ‘ There’s certain portraits to where it’s just like this is a depiction of this, but I wanted this [mural] to [cross] lines, where it’s androgynous enough that you can make your connection to it.”

The Guild Goddess was widely admired and celebrated by community members, leaders, and artists. People took notice and wanted more. King went on to create more than 10 murals in Sacramento over the span of six years. Brandy Dean, special project coordinator for the Guild Theater, describes King’s artwork as a “true gem that adds to the beauty and character of [Oak Park].” She says the woman’s face in the mural is “filled with fearlessness and confidence, which is a powerful reminder of our community’s resilience and strength.”

King in front of the completed “Hollywood Habitat” mural in Sacramento. [Credit: Jaya King]

Her next project, expected to be completed in 2024, will be an abstract vinyl wrap mural on a new housing development in Sacramento, where she will work with architects to combine art and technology to produce the final piece. She’s also working with friend and local artist, Juliet Rodriguez, to create a mural and programming in collaboration with WEAVE, a local non-profit dedicated to promoting healthy relationships and supporting survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and sex trafficking. Rodriguez, who has worked with King on four projects over the past few years, describes her as an amazing teacher and supporter. She says King designed a “phenomenal mural” and they are working together to “develop hands-on creative workshops for survivors surrounding the creation of the [piece],” says Rodriguez. “[Jaya and I] are currently searching for the best wall space for the project and organizing the workshop curriculum.”

King is also working on an ongoing black-and-white portrait project, where she paints her friends and random people she meets in her day-to-day life who she says inspire her. She posts her paintings and the process of creating them on her Instagram page.

“Seeing my friends or those that are within this arts community do their thing or speak their truth or paint what they want to paint and put it out there, that’s inspiring,” says King. “We’re all doing it.”