Jared Diaz (they/he) is a second generation Dominican artist, born and based in New York City. Diaz has a visual art practice that has focused on figuration and portraiture for over fifteen years. They graduated Pratt Institute holding a BFA with highest honors in 2017 and within a year began managing facilities at one of the largest hand painted billboard companies in America.
In their sign painting career, Diaz contributed to the management and painting execution of more than two thousand large scale murals. During this time Diaz became the manager of their facilities while learning the entire apprenticeship program. Working with mural painters who erected their own scaffolding, called “swing-stages,” Diaz had the responsibility of stewarding each new apprentice into the fundamentals of the career, techniques, safety and leadership. By 2020 Diaz took an informal, “each-one-teach-one” model of training and instituted a modular syllabus and robust curriculum that they taught hands-on to over 80 mural apprentices within five years.
Less than three years into this career Diaz joined an organically formed team of painters of color to embark on the now highly publicized I AM Series. Having a backbone in management, operations and painting, Diaz helped drive the coordination, planning, resourcing, permitting, and painting in three of the now completed four-part series. With no corporate sponsorship, Diaz and company worked against the odds to raise a series of crowdfunded, permanent, large scale mural monuments that pay homage to civil rights history.
In 2021, Diaz took on two new careers while still co-creating the I AM series and holding another full time job. With no promise of compensation, Diaz worked with a nonprofit in Louisville, KY to co-author a grant for the nationally publicized and internationally known Public Art and Civic Engagement initiative ran by the Mural Arts Institute of Philadelphia. Diaz and company won this award and secured a generous six-figure grant to specifically support the Black artists in Louisville. For the next three years, while creating their own body of work, Diaz became a project manager for this initiative. Through their work, they set institutional community and artist goals and objectives to drive sustainable change in the local arts ecosystem and at the local non profit, LVA. These projects have now been accomplished, each as a permanent installation at local community centers and museums.
The third and final career Diaz took on at this same time was becoming the Founder of a nonprofit organization: Open Air Projects. Founded in 2021 and receiving 501(c)(3) status in 2022, Diaz has leveraged their institutional knowledge to develop a niche art program that serves to specifically promote cultural equity through mural art. By March of 2021, Diaz had already executed the nonprofits first pilot program: the Open Air Archive, which aims to preserve history normally located in the niche view of local archives and promote them on the stage of public art. After nine months of planning, community dialogues and execution, the Open Air Archive had manifested through the 1,500 square foot mural-monument, HENRIETTA.