ArtsQuest Judges

April Fitzpatrick

April Fitzpatrick, LMHC, ATR-BC is a mixed media visual artist and CEO of Pineapples with Purpose, LLC, a mobile mental health service that introduces art therapy to communities impacted by race-based traumatic stress. Her current project calls into question her role as a visual artist and art therapist within Black communal spaces. Combining contemporary abstraction with experimental narrative, she captures the layered realities of Blackness. She uses auto and medical ethnographic processes to confront the invisibility of race based traumatic stress (RBTS). Investigating the insidiousness of racial messaging, her work sits at the intersection of cultural memory and symbolism. Together, these processes coalesce (1) personal experiences of RBTS, (2) client-practitioner relationships (3) histories of racial violence and (4) contemporary impact of racial trauma. Her practice, as both a process and product, visually translates the complexities of RBTS using the pineapple as a guiding metaphor. Employing art therapy as a tool for storytelling, she creates space to construct new narratives and progress racial healing.

Jayson Kretzer

Professional Cartoonist and Designer for more than 25 years and recently became the Executive Director for the Bay Arts Alliance in Panama City, FL whose mission is making art accessible for all in the community regardless of location or income barriers.

illustration agency that represents international illustrators and designers. He received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Southern California with a BA in Fine Arts, and from Art Center College of Design with a BFA in Illustration. He received his MFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design.