About the artist
Jenae Porter is a painter and muralist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Studio Art from the University of South Dakota. She currently resides in Sioux Falls, SD and produces work under her business name—Soul Fire Studio Company. Porter founded Soul Fire on the principle that personalized artwork holds powerful weight, validation, and pride by visually representing their life stories.
Deeply impacted by personal experience, contemporary culture, and human behavior, Porter combines those influences with her passion for empathy to develop metaphors and hypothetical scenarios that address social and cultural constructs. Porter devotes herself to advocating for and normalizing conversations surrounding mental illness that reveal the emotional intensity that coinsides with it. Her approach to revealing that intensity in her body of work is evident in the strong use of nuanced color palettes to suggest an altered state of reality.
Porter’s studio practice aims to confront difficult topics, to initiate a safe space for those topics, and to ignite meaningful and critical conversations to improve our capacity for solidarity and empathy. Her murals can be found in Vermillion, SD (3); Letcher, SD (1); and Grand Junction, CO (1). Her studio work has been exhibited at institutions located in Grand Rapids, MN, Vermillion, SD, and Brooklyn, NY. You can find more of Porter and her business on Instagram, @soulfirestudioco.