In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Brazillian born artist Jamil Hellu.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In this Episode, Emily interviews artist Jamil Hellu. Jamil shares his multicultural background—Brazilian, Syrian, Paraguayan, American, and queer—and discusses how these identities inform his work. The conversation explores his journey from Brazil to the U.S., his evolution as an artist, and his teaching at Stanford.
Jamil talks about his latest exhibition, "In the Studio," at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, which delves into identity, transformation, and the use of vibrant color and materials in self-portraiture. He reflects on his creative process, the influence of queer culture, and the importance of community in the Bay Area.
The episode also features Jamil’s thoughts on representation, the impact of artists like Claude Cahun, and the significance of residencies in his artistic development. Tune in for an inspiring discussion about art, identity, and the power of self-expression.
About Artist Jamil Hellu:
Jamil Hellu is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who creates personal and politically charged projects to expand the discourse on identity representation. Through an interdisciplinary studio practice rooted in photography, his work is a dynamic exploration of queerness, community, and cultural heritage.
Born in Brazil and of Middle Eastern descent, Hellu's diverse ethnic background informs his practice and research, offering a critical lens through which to examine issues of race, discrimination, and belonging. In today’s political climate, where LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, and racial justice remain central to social struggles, Hellu’s projects invite viewers to consider the ways we construct, perceive, and validate identities.
Through a vibrant visual vocabulary, he repeatedly engages in self-portraiture, activating conversations around visibility, cultural lineage, and the evolving nature of self-representation. His work contributes to ongoing discussions about who gets to be seen and who doesn’t and the power of visual storytelling as a form of resistance.
Hellu earned his MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and has exhibited widely. His work has been discussed in publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Artforum, and VICE. His projects have been supported by grants and residencies such as the Fleishhacker Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
An active participant in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community, Hellu serves as an Advisory Board member for Recology’s Artist-in-Residence Program and represents local artists in the Board of Directors of SF Camerawork. He is a Photography Lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.
Visit Jamil's Website: JamilHellu.net
Follow Jamil on Instagram: @Jamil.Hellu
For more about Jamil's exhibit "In The Studio" at Rebecca Camacho Presents CLICK HERE.
--
About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
--
CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 1 0 2 0.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes,
Artist Jamil Hellu: There's obviously the cultural background that informs the work in the context of a multicultural perspective. Brazilian Syrian, Paraguayan, American immigrant, queer. Happy, joyful, sad. There's so much.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Jamil Hellu, the guest on this week's Art is awesome.
I’m your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people [00:01:00] that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work. Jamil Hellu was born in Brazil to a Syrian father and a Paraguayan mother. He moved to the United States at 19, first to Florida and then to California.
A good friend of his from childhood was a filmmaker, and he inspired Jamil to do photography. Jamil studied at Cabrillo College, then at the San Francisco Art Institute. Then he went to Stanford University, where he now teaches Jamil, has done residencies at Kala Art Institute, the Headland Center for the Arts, and Recology. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, the Colorado Photographic Art Center, and the Blanton Museum of Art in Texas. His most recent show is at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, called In the [00:02:00] Studio.
It continues a series, Jamil began a couple of years ago. Odyssey. On view through December 19th, it's an exploration of identity and remaking oneself. We met at the gallery the day after the opening and talked about his love of color, how he was an acting group and wrote poetry as a kid, and his self portraits where he is wrapped in material.
Artist Jamil Hellu: The work has evolved in the context of material experimentation, like how to think about material, different ways to reshape, and the metaphor for identity in, in, in construction, and then in transformation. I tend to use a lot of color in my work has been an ongoing aesthetic that has defined my practice.
I grew up in Brazil in a very, very colorful culture. I would say as a complicated as any culture can be. There's something very interesting in the context of this visual [00:03:00] aesthetic through color that manifests into the work colors. Also for me is, is a materials as well that I can think about, uh, which to manipulate or this idea, the color is not static.
It continues to evolve. If you paint a wall, for example, and sunlight over time makes a color to fade.
Host Emily Wilson: Jamil and I were in the gallery with 24 of his 22 by 17 digital photos.
Artist Jamil Hellu: It's me in the studio by myself using different materials to create a shape, to create a form that is quite fleeting. The camera is on a tripod have flash and I do a mix of flash and long exposure. Try to think about liminal space, what's in between the way we design Rebecca and I this presentation is related to the idea of inviting someone to a studio visit, for example, how to put images on the wall to, to give a sense of the progression of the work.
Host Emily Wilson: Before starting this series, Odyssey, Jamil worked for about five years on a project called Hues. [00:04:00]
Artist Jamil Hellu: I created collaborations with quite a diverse range of queer people of ideas, of queerness and cultural heritage into the project. And I use a lot of color and, uh, it was very important to define my work.
Host Emily Wilson: When the pandemic hit access to other people was limited, Jamil started doing self portraits in his studio.
Artist Jamil Hellu: I was a very feminine kid growing up as a child, and I felt over time that the, the femininity was clipped. There was so much denial and rejection, and I started to mold myself in a certain type of masculinity and become who I become through a, a very conscientious thought process of how to think about representation, masculinity through how I create my gestures, how do I occupy a space, how do I cross my legs and. Through my work over the years, the studio has given me an interesting space to activate a sense of femininity, and no [00:05:00] longer was there in a sense socially, as I go around about my life in the world.
And Odyssey made me think about this, about the Greek Odyssey. But there's something very beautiful about the award itself, this journey, and it's a journey of return. There's this, as hard as it is, as difficult as this journey can be, is about this return.
Host Emily Wilson: At first glance, you might think the photo is of a swirl of material, but Jamil is in each one, sometimes with a hand or foot visible, but mostly hidden behind the latex or velvet or leather.
Artist Jamil Hellu: I use a really broad range of materials now, thinking about ways that I can manipulate the material on my body. So it essentially is the camera's on a tripod. I have a self-timer and I am from the camera embodying essentially these materials to arrive to a shape. The work is a lot of process of discovery, so I'm constantly discovering what's about to happen and what's happening in front of the camera.
[00:06:00] And I keep, the word's not struggling 'cause there's a lot of play in the work, but I keep at times wrestling with the material.
Host Emily Wilson: He talked about one of the pieces,
Artist Jamil Hellu: one that I really love is this one in leather. Thinking about in, in queer culture, right, the presence of leather and what does it mean to embody or articulate ideas of leather.
Leather as a resistance, leather as a way to to think about protest. How leather has been manifested in, in 1950s and, and sixties, and this idea of leather culture. So for me, this piece, leather and the pink, you have a pink, this black leather shape and this pink backdrop. So there's something very important on this reference to queer history.
Host Emily Wilson: Jamil says he didn't consider being a visual artist growing up, but he did have a creative outlet that shaped him.
Artist Jamil Hellu: I was part of acting group, and so this idea of having a social life connected to creation within ideas of play and [00:07:00] performance, one of my closest friends growing up still a very, very dear.
Is a film maker since we were 13, uh, 12 years old. He wanted to be a filmmaker. And through him I learned a lot about cinema. And the, the, the idea of the study of the image was very, very important for me. But I didn't identify myself as this idea that potentially I could have, uh, an artist career that could be an artist.
I didn't see myself mirrored in the culture or things that I saw in the world that would give me the, uh, an entry point that. That could also be my story.
Host Emily Wilson: Jamil has done a lot of residencies at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, at Montalvo Art Center in Saratoga, and at the Space Program in San Francisco.
They were all important in his artistic development. He talked about one he did right after graduating from Stanford at Recology, San Francisco's Recycling and Transfer Station. Now he's on their board.
Artist Jamil Hellu: It's a wonderful, uh, [00:08:00] opportunity for artists to engage with disposable materials, recycling materials.
So this idea that artists get access to what people bring to the facility, people, what people throw out. And through working with a broad range of materials, open up different ways from each to think about self portraiture, photography, and through that, the work become a lot more interdisciplinary. I always say this kind almost like a joke.
But it's so true. I started, um, the residency of Recology as a photographer and I finished, I completed that residency as an artist.
Host Emily Wilson: Jamil loves teaching at Stanford.
Artist Jamil Hellu: I learned how to, over the years to become the teacher that I wanted to have, a teacher that listens. I teach them that encourage students to activate their own agency.
For themselves. I think for me it, it took a while to be understood as a student, to be understood as an international student, and the way that I cultivate my classes now is really to activate students in their own [00:09:00] power in their own agency.
Host Emily Wilson: Jamil grew up in Brazil with a Syrian father and a Paraguayan mother.
I asked him if he's always trying to bring all of himself into his art.
Artist Jamil Hellu: We are a multitude of things, and I tell my students this all the time in the classrooms idea of representation. We are so many, so much, we are a lot in, it's some constant evolution and a lot of fluidity on that. So my work speaks to that conversation.
There's obviously the cultural background that informs the work in the context of. A, a multicultural perspective, right? Brazilian, Syrian, Paraguayan, uh, American immigrant, queer. Happy, joyful, sad. So there's so much.
Host Emily Wilson: This is three questions where I ask the guests the same three things. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that's had an impact on you, and [00:10:00] what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Jamil Hellu: When did I know I was an artist? Hmm. I wrote a lot of poems during my teen years. I have a quite strong religious background, Catholic, and it was a lot of rebellion around what I was learning. And I think writing was something interesting to manifest a sense of, of expression about what I was feeling at the time.
And it was very, always very poetic. Something very lyrical about the way that I approached writing cinema came along and this idea of the image and how to translate emotion through something. Visual photography has this alert, just this very interesting attraction to me. Uh, quite an early, early age. And I think.
Through school, through being school. This idea, I potentially, I could be an artist. I could have my, my [00:11:00] story being expressed through photography. I think it's an evolution. It's hard to say I'm an, I'll be an artist or it's, but for me it's very much, it was, it was a journey. It was an evolution
Works that have had a big impact on me. Mm. My God, so much, so much. The entire history of photography. It's pretty incredible. I, for a moment, and I still think about this, that I wish I could do a PhD in photo history to really dig in and do more research about queerness in the history of photography. And early on will have, uh, an important artist for me in my practice called Claude Cahun, a French photographer.
Who in 1910s, 1920s articulated a lot, a lot of ideas about identity and the multiplicity of identity. There's something that has always been very inspirational about that body of work, and I [00:12:00]often think, and what other photographers. Maybe didn't have the same exposure, but we're dealing with these themes, we're dealing with these questions early on.
So this idea of PhD in art history has fascinated me to explore more what, what has been forgotten or raised, over time that speaks to ideas of queerness.
The Bay itself. This history of this place is incredible. I lived in San Francisco for many, many years, last five years I've been living in Oakland now. I love the Bay Area. Has been very, very important in my formation, in my education, not only by. Going to schools around here, but also by living here and upholding a strong sense of of community I have created for myself, and I'm very proud of that. A very, very strong community of friends and people that I truly love. And you [00:13:00] saw some of that yesterday last night in the opening. But I continue to support my work the same way that I support their work is a wonderful exchange, but also this idea of manifesting your identity as a queer person in the world.
Within the history of the Bay Area, it's, it continues to be a very, very, uh, rich place. That's as a foundation for many, many people, right? This idea that you come here to realize yourself, something very interesting on that San Francisco in its, in its, its history has been very powerful and influential to the rest of the world.
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks to our guest, Jamil Hellu. His show in the studio is at Rebecca Camacho Presents on Washington Street in San Francisco through December 19th. Starting December 6th, he'll be part of a group show at the space program at Minnesota Street. Project Beauty is resistance. And [00:14:00] thank you for listening.
Please follow the show if you don't already, and join us next time when the guest will be Kathy Aoki, a 2025 Creative Capital awardee for Koons Ruins.
Art Is Awesome is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Goto Productions. It's carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 FM San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM. Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Inec Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome podcast or visit our website till next [00:15:00]time.