Despite her prolific career, it wouldn’t be fair to call Georgia Mills Jessup a jack-of-all-trades.

Rather, she was an artist who explored and created as a way of navigating her lived experiences, utilizing various mediums to explore her identity as a woman, a Native American, a Washingtonian, and more. Having African American, Native American, and European heritage, Jessup is a self-proclaimed melting pot – a microcosm of many of the identities that have come to constitute the American experience.

Jessup also had art-making in her blood. She was the thirteenth of eighteen children, and twenty-nine of her family members both before and after worked in the arts. Passing down a love for art to her family, friends, and students became as important as passing down the traditions of her native heritage. Like Alma Thomas, being an art educator was a central element of Jessup’s identity, and she taught in the Washington, D.C., public school system for thirteen years.

Before she could teach others, Jessup took her own art education seriously. She studied with Loïs Mailou Jones at Howard University and earned her BFA in Painting. During her time at Howard, Jessup studied human anatomy alongside the medical school students. Like Thomas Eakins and Leonardo da Vinci before her, she knew the importance of engrossing herself in these realistic studies. Then, she attended the Catholic University of America to pursue an MFA in Ceramics. For Jessup, working with ceramics was a deeply personal experience. She began working with clay because of her ancestral ties to the Pamunkey Tribe of Virginia, who established their pottery practice centuries prior to the European arrival in the region. Her ceramic work mixed traditional Pamunkey techniques with contemporary twists. Though she was born during a time when many hid their Native identities for fear of persecution, Jessup used her art to celebrate her Native ancestry.

Jessup was a painter, collagist, ceramicist, muralist, and sculptor. Basically she utilized any medium that could communicate her message, which was often political. In addition to exploring her Native ancestry and the complexities of the Native American experience, she also painted in response to contemporary events, like the 1968 riots in D.C. that were sparked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.