Jessica Sabogal

Jessica Sabogal (born 1987) is a queer Colombian-American muralist and stencil spray paint artist who is currently active in the Bay Area. She's best known for her "Women Are Perfect! (If You Let Them)" visual campaign which she created as an artist in residence in 2014 at the Galeria de la Raza, and she is currently active in the "We The People" public art campaign created in collaboration with Shepard Fairey. Sabogal was born and raised in San Francisco, California. She is the daughter of Colombian immigrants who came to America for a better education and to escape the normalization of violence and terror caused by the Pablo Escobar drug market. She graduated from UC San Diego in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in Political Science and became involved in stencil spray painting. Soon after, she began to publicly display and sell her artwork locally on the East Coast. Her first solo exhibition entitled "Womyn So Empowered Are Dangerous" opened in Northampton, Massachusetts in 2010 and later that year Sabogal opened her first Bay Area exhibition entitled "La Mujer Es Mi Religion". This same year, Sabogal received one of her earliest major commissions from Penguin Books in which she designed the 20th anniversary cover of Dorothy Allison's novel Bastard Out of Carolina that was released a year later. Soon after, she became the first female artist to be commissioned by Facebook to paint a series of panels at their headquarters in Menlo Park. Her work has also been part of Facebook's "Getting More Women in Tech" video. In addition to Facebook her murals have been commissioned by Google, 20th Century Fox, USC( University of Southern California), UCSF, CSU San Marcos, University of Arizona, and University of Utah and her work has been featured in national and international media such as CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. Sabogal has since displayed her works in exhibitions throughout Oakland and San Francisco. She also has previously been sponsored by major spray paint supplier Montana Cans.