Dreaming Big With LunART's 2025 Festival Artist-In-Residence Desere Mayo
- keeleybrooks0
- May 10
- 5 min read
Talking with Desere Mayo left me dreaming big. She has an infectious energy, will to create and ability to see and make connections that is everything that I think art is all about. We’re so excited to be partnering with Desere as the 2025 LunART Festival Artist-In-Residence. Desere’s work is featured on our publicity materials as well as new merch and she’ll also have works for sale during the festival.
As part of her impressive and education-driven artistic career, Desere is a member of the Oregon Public Art Committee and was a Makeup Artist for the recent production of the Lion King Jr. at Oregon Middle School. She also often collaborates with professional sports teams, recently making a poster for the Forward Madison Flamingos, and is a regular contributor to UMOJA magazine where her work has been featured on four covers of the publication.
Her goal in sharing her art with kids is to provide an engaging learning opportunity in history that makes them feel seen and sparks their own ideas. It’s important to her that kids are not only learning information, but seeing an artistic representation of the individual they are learning about. That makes it all the more real.
“We have to be able to keep history alive. I want to be able to teach them something and then they see it.”
Desere began drawing at a young age and turned to portraits in early high school.
“I started drawing people in ninth grade because my eighth grade teacher told me I couldn’t do it. So I was like, okay, well I’m going to figure it out.”
She went on to attend the Art Institute of Pittsburgh where she had a teacher who taught her how to shade with any pencil. She learned to take an X-ACTO knife and cut down to the lead of the pencil. They would then sand the lead down to a very sharp point, hold far away from the tip and brush across the page. In the classroom, Desere learned to fade with the pencil, but she wanted to explore more on her own.
“If you want to blend something on your face, you use a makeup brush. And I was just like, well then, why don’t I just use a makeup brush?”
She found that it works perfectly for charcoal.
Another technique that Desere loves to use in her work is pointillism. We briefly talked about our shared love of JoAnn Fabrics where her favorite micron pens are sold. She uses different sized pens depending on the level of detail needed for each dot in a work. From far away, it is hard to tell that the images are made of so many precise dots.
We commissioned Desere to make images of women composers for the festival this year which will be sold on notecards (check out the merch tables at each festival event!). Desere made these images on her ipad, where she appreciated the ability to zoom in and make even more detailed dots. Make sure to look closely to appreciate hidden music notes in the images such as in the ruffled collar of the Amy Beach portrait. In the future, Desere dreams of making a whole periodic table of female composers, like her previous periodic table of Black historical figures.
While Desere was working on a collage, an 18” x 24” picture of Aretha Franklin, she said, “you had to listen.” The collage includes five drawings of Aretha at different ages throughout her life. As a result, Desere listened to songs from across her four decade career. Engaging with the artists’ music is a key step to her creative process when drawing musicians, something that she has done frequently as part of her Black Excellence in Music series, part of her broader Black Excellence collection.
Desere researches each of the subjects that she draws deeply and has worked closely with schools such as Cesar Chavez Elementary school where nine of her portraits of famous African American figures hang in the school library. In 2018, Desere presented at the school during a Black Excellence Assembly and showed a time-lapse of her creating one of the works. Desere loves using time-lapses to show the process behind her work.
“My goal is to try to teach kids history with art.”
Her goals for future projects include a semester-long art piece where each week students learn about a particular person and put up their portrait on the wall. By the end of the year, there is a whole periodic table of history told through portraits. She also dreams of buying her own school bus and has already completed the training needed to drive one.
“I want to take the seat covers off and fill it with history on the actual fabric. So you can read things on the seats. So instead of just sitting there, you’re reading. You walk in and it’s just art everywhere.”
Desere loves talking with others about creative ideas. From an installation on the man who created the yellow part of the traffic light to new superheroes to an animated short told from the perspective of an instrument, our conversation was filled with me saying “That would be so cool!”
“It’s something new and then you never know how far it can go….You’re feeding each other and then you both are just like, we should do this.”
I could have kept talking with Desere forever, and we already made plans for another idea session to come.
Come share in our moment of collective creativity at the LunART Festival later this month. Join us for the opening of the festival on Wednesday, May 28th at 7:30pm at the Arts + Literature Lab to hear Desere in conversation on our Her Legacy, Our Voice panel discussion!
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Article by Keeley Brooks
Keeley Brooks is a senior at Yale University, majoring in music and studying violin with Wendy Sharp. She is currently working on her thesis, an oral history on violin pedagogue Dorothy DeLay that will be housed as a public archive at Yale’s Oral History of American Music. In addition to playing in the ensemble, Keeley has loved exploring various administrative roles in the Yale Symphony Orchestra from Head Librarian, to co-Social Chair to President for the 24/25 school year. This past summer, Keeley took her first steps into composition while working for the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison where she wrote a piece that incorporates field recordings from a prescribed burn. She premiered the piece this April. When Keeley isn’t participating in music, she enjoys teaching fitness classes, spending time exploring outside with friends and family and baking.
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