Jaya King is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Sacramento, California. She is known for creating dramatic texture and movement in both her acrylic and encaustic abstract and semi-abstract artworks. Her dynamic paintings marry the balance of technique while pushing the boundaries of texture and color.
Practice
In addition to her studio work Jaya has taught for 15 years in her own teaching practice. Pre-pandemic, Jaya’s painting workshops gave her students the opportunity to grow as artists and express their individuality. In 2020 Jaya pivoted her classroom online and is finalizing her e-book on color harmony. She lectures on painting technique, the importance of involving youth in art, and navigating an art career with a creative business mindset.
As an art advocate, Jaya champions artists as essential culture-bearers and believes in uplifting the creative workforce. She actively promotes the visibility, value, and impact of artistic contributions across communities and industries.
Background
She pushes the boundaries of her artistic practice with her dynamic community and commercial murals. She works with non-profits, development and city agencies, and the Department of Transportation (Caltrans). Her mural work frequently involves collaborating with and activating underserved communities.
One project of note was leading a community mural beautifying the 21st Avenue underpass, a 4,800-square-foot gateway linking two neighborhoods that were cut off by the construction of Highway 99 in the 1960s.
Public Work & Community
In her studio practice, Jaya works across semi-abstract landscape and atmospheric painting. Themes of landscape, atmosphere, and memory recur throughout the work. Color and monochrome operate as both subject and structure, guiding the viewer through compositions that feel expansive and immersive. The dialogue between abstraction, landscape, and portrait remains central, with each body of work influencing the next.
Material exploration plays an equally important role. Jaya moves between heavily textured acrylic palette-knife paintings and hyper-smooth, blended surfaces that emphasize light and atmosphere. Working primarily in acrylic and encaustic, her process is physical and layered by building, scraping, incising, and reworking surfaces until the composition fully emerges.
In both paint and clay, she returns to portraiture and the human form as sites of presence and inquiry. Her engagement with portraiture is informed by an ongoing exploration of the relationship between Black and white (personally, socially, and visually) examining contrast, visibility, and nuance across mediums.
In recent years, she has expanded her portrait work, bringing the same dynamic mark-making and chromatic intensity into figurative compositions. She is currently developing a new body of work for her 2027 solo exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art.
Artwork
She received the Creative Growth Fellowship, she is a Gloria Burt Sacramento Region Art Fellow, and a California Arts Council Impact grant recipient. Her artwork is in the permanent collections at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA and the Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, NM.
Selected Honors
For a full list of exhibitions, public art projects, and professional experience, view Jaya's CV
Press & Articles about Jaya