2020: Eloa Jane

Native of Brazil, she moved to the United States in the mid 2000’s for a fresh start. Her unstable financial condition and the many unanticipated pressures of being an immigrant put her in a fragile emotional state. Eloa Jane had been artistic growing up. Now, after a 25-year Architecture career and a drastic relocation, the art of her youth resurfaced as a healing tool.

With little resources, she experimented with what she had in abundance, namely, junk mail. She made baskets and wearables before moving on to more daring creations. She signed up for her first craft show in 2008 and, later that year, joined an art gallery. From then on, she continued to create and exhibit at various galleries in Massachusetts, Virginia and Arkansas.

Some of her highlights are the 2014 WAH Center Special Merit Award, the 2019 Best-In-Show by Artists of Northwest Arkansas (ANA) an Honorable Mention by Circle Foundation For The Arts (CFA) in Lyon, France and the 2020 Artist Award winner of the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Most notably, she was awarded the Mid-America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Grant in 2019 which allowed her to create Neighbors & Neighborhood, her first series and largest-scale project yet whose works have featured in publications like artGuidemag and The Idle Class.