JADE CRUZ
ALBUQUERQUE 2025 - 2026
Jade Cruz is a queer gender expansive Chicanx visual artist, muralist, teaching artist, and youth/cultural worker, based on Tiwa Pueblo land, aka Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their practice encompasses painting, digital illustration and murals, activated and emerging as a response to injustice, grief, and love. Rooted in the understanding that art serves as a form of radical storytelling, education, and collective healing, they honor their artistic and ancestral lineage to continue the legacy of creative liberatory practices. Incorporating symbolism drawn from flora and fauna specific to their environment and cultural lineage, their artwork features bold, vibrant colors that weave together themes of spirituality, gender identity, honoring life and death, and addressing social justice issues. Cruz works alongside various organizations, grassroots projects, schools, museums, and cultural art centers, primarily working with youth and people of color. Committed to using art as a tool for education, justice, and healing, Cruz continues to explore new ways to empower through creative expression.
Community Project
Jade will be implementing community-based art projects designed to support people's healing in recovery from substance use, grief, trauma, and displacement. Rooted in the belief that art is medicine, Jade is developing workshops that focus on creativity, community, and connection to nature, integrating art making, story, and collective rituals. Their hope is that this series promotes collaboration and self-reflection, reduces isolation and stigma, honors grief and transformation, celebrates resilience, and envisions new futures for participants. The series will culminate in a collaborative mural and grief altar, shared at a public gathering around Dia De Los Muertos. Jade seeks to collaborate with an organization that supports this vision by connecting them to an established space with people in recovery from substance use. The ideal community partner will support in facilitating engagement, and understand the role art and cultural grief practices play in healing spaces. Jade aims to emphasize the importance of connecting to land, art, and each other for healing and recovery.
Community Partner
La Plazita Institute, Inc. (LPI) is a healing-centered organization with over 20 years of service. Our mission is to use a comprehensive, holistic, and cultural approach grounded in the philosophy of La Cultura Cura to engage youth, elders, and communities in drawing from their own roots and histories. Through this work, we foster the expression of core traditional values of respect, honor, love, and family.