When asked about her artistic inspiration, Janice Kennedy states, "I paint all that I ever knew. I was practically born in a cotton field." Growing up as a cotton sharecropper in Georgia, Kennedy was forced to sacrifice her childhood and education for the labor of the fields. Even now, says Kennedy, "Seeing a cotton field makes my back ache and my fingers feel like they are bleeding."

Approximately five years ago, Kennedy turned to painting as a method of preserving the "forgotten labor" of sharecropping, extremely hard work that yielded very little profit. Kennedy paints the farmhouses and cotton fields in which she, her family and their neighbors lived and toiled. This painting, for example, shows "our old house that never had any paint on it."

In her art, Kennedy feels she is painting a very personal part of history and hopes her story can be an inspiration to her audience. "I want my paintings to lift people’s spirits, if they are as poor as I was…or maybe make a rich man be more thankful for what he has. I want people to know that they don’t have to depend on the material things of life. They don’t get you anywhere anyway."

[artist biography by Sydney Pettus]
Janice Kennedy
An end to picking cotton for one more year, 2001, acrylic on museum board