JuVan Langford
FOUNDER
Good JuJu Gallery was founded by JuVan Langford, also known as JuVee—a Cape Verdean American artist, international wellness advisor, language artist, and agent of behavioral change.
For nearly two decades, Langford studied the emotional lives of high-performing adolescent and adult males across six continents and more than 40 countries. Drawing from his own experience of fatherlessness, that field research eventually found a new language: art.
What began with self-taught experimentation at home grew into more than 475 original works, transforming his home into his first boutique gallery —and eventually, a traveling one.
Today, Good JuJu Gallery is a traveling gallery & residency, community classroom, and practice field using art, technology and assembly to bring father & son into deeper relationship with themselves, one another, and their local communities.
AS SEEN ON:
Artist Statement
I believe art, like conversation, is medicinal.
Both have a way of bringing to the surface what we’ve spent a lifetime learning to keep down.
I came to the blue lines and page looking for somewhere to put my anger. What I found was a place to meet it, listen to it, and eventually learn what it had been protecting. The more I created, the more I understood that an emotion without a language will find another way to speak.
My body of work lives at the intersection of art and emotional recovery. I use texture, language systems, and the familiar blue lines of a paper tablet to explore identity, intimacy, and the complicated inheritance between fathers & sons.
I’m interested in what goes unsaid, what gets passed down, and what becomes possible when we finally have the words. I spent much of my childhood being hurt by men and dedicated my enitre adulthood in pursuit of understanding why.
Along the way, I began to see how many men had never been witnessed themselves—how often pain was mistaken for personality, silence was mistaken for strength, and a man was expected to lead a life he had never been taught to examine.I don’t make art to offer easy answers. I make it to create better conditions for honest questions. The kind that follow you home. The kind that sit with you at the dinner table. The kind that may change the way you see your father, your son, or the man in the mirror.
The world has offered us plenty of ways to get over what happened. I’m more interested in what happens when we get stronger, tell the truth, and give our experiences somewhere to live.
That is what this gallery is for.
A place to pause. A place to feel. A place to find yourself in someone else’s story—and perhaps find the courage to write yourself into your own.
Welcome to the conversation.
