Jessica Sabogal

Sabogal was born and raised in San Francisco, California. She is the daughter of Colombian immigrants who came to America for a better education and to escape the normalization of violence and terror caused by the Pablo Escobar drug market. She graduated from UC San Diego in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in Political Science and became involved in stencil spray painting. Soon after, she began to publicly display and sell her artwork locally on the East Coast. Her first solo exhibition entitled "Womyn So Empowered Are Dangerous" opened in Northampton, Massachusetts in 2010 and later that year Sabogal opened her first Bay Area exhibition entitled "La Mujer Es Mi Religion".This same year, Sabogal received one of her earliest major commissions from Penguin Books in which she designed the 20th anniversary cover of Dorothy Allison's novel Bastard Out of Carolina that was released a year later. Soon after, she became the first female artist to be commissioned by Facebook to paint a series of panels at their headquarters in Menlo Park. Her work has also been part of Facebook's "Getting More Women in Tech" video. Sabogal has since displayed her works in exhibitions throughout Oakland and San Francisco. She also has previously been sponsored by major spray paint supplier Montana Cans. She has also designed pieces for the artist's collective Unceded Voices, an Anti-Colonial Street Artist's Convergence based in Montréal for indigenous and women of color street artists. In 2014, Sabogal became the first artist in residence and mural coordinator for the Galería de La Raza, a non-profit arts organization which features Latinx and indigenous artistic identity in San Francisco's Mission District.

"Women Are Perfect! (If You Let Them)"

In 2014 Sabogal held an artistic campaign entitled "Women Are Perfect!", an exhibition hosted by the Galería de la Raza which featured much of her own work in addition to pieces submitted by 27 other self-identifying women of color from across the nation. This campaign was meant to serve as a tribute to female identity, specifically to the lived experiences of indigenous women and women of color who have been left out of the prevailing narrative of "womanhood".

"Our Existence Will No Longer Be Silenced..."

One of Sabogal's larger projects is a 30 foot tall mural located in Montreal. Created in 2015 during the annual Decolonizing Street Art Convergence, it depicts a lesbian couple alongside with the quote "Our Existence Will No Longer Be Silenced, we require no explanations, apologies, or approvals". The foundational image used for this mural is also a part of Shepard Fairley's "We The People" Public Art Campaign and has become a popular political image and poster in the queer and activist community.