In the early 2000s, 18-year-old Jessica Moore Harjo walked into the art college at Oklahoma State University with her mind made up. She wanted to pursue a career in art. But her advisor stopped her in her tracks.
The advisor, who was non-Native, took one look at Moore Harjo and said, “You won’t be successful here.”
The young artist in the making didn’t know how to respond to blatant racism at the time, so she just walked out. Since then, the interdisciplinary designer and artist has gone on a journey with milestones, including the installation of intersectional Native designs in the Oklahoma State Capitol, teaching full-time for a year as a professor, designing the Osage typeface for the Making of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ book (a film in which she appears as Henry Roanhorse’s girlfriend Pearl), and winning first place in the computer-generated art category of the SWAIA Indian Market.
In December of 2023, she presented on representative art and design as tools for anti-racism at an international conference in Brazil and came full circle in confronting the structural racism that initially prevented her from first pursuing the career of her choosing.
Though she was hurt as a young student, Moore Harjo did not let the encounter deter her from studying art — instead, she pursued a minor in studio art. However, the moment of prejudice redirected her to obtain her first degree in landscape architecture, introducing her to design concepts.
When she graduated at the height of the recession, jobs were sparse, so she worked part-time and did internships for a year and a half before returning to school, this time to study graphic design. “I was still intrigued by this graphic design field, always have been,” she said, of enrolling in a master’s program focusing on graphic design at the University of Minnesota. “They have an excellent design school, a graphic design track, specifically. That’s when I really dove into those principles of design, beyond the basic principles.”
In the 2010s, the art world was just beginning to accept graphic design as a defined medium in fine art; but Harjo took an experimental approach during the course of her master’s thesis, and implemented design practices to make Wahzhazhe ie typefaces, and then later, on a whim, jewelry. She’s since created clothing, visual art, installations and more. That experimentation all began as she set out to work with the Osage language orthography for her first master’s thesis.
In her graduate thesis, she set out to redesign the Osage orthography, working with the language department, interviewing Cameron Pratt and Dr. Herman “Mogri” Lookout to see what was needed in the written forms. That thesis continued into her PhD work. “It was an area that had not been explored yet, and that fueled me to be one of the only voices in design from a Native perspective, in typography,” Moore Harjo said.
One day in a span of years of work, in a moment of levity, she used a laser cutter tool to make an earring. “You know, when you print stencils there are negative pieces from what’s cut out. I held it up and was like, ‘This could be an earring. I should make some earrings with ribbon work on it, or something.’ And I did that, and kind of threw it out there to the world, and they all sold out right away.”
The innovative, contemporary jewelry of Weomepe, popular with Osage women and Natives across the United States today, came out of the “different way to apply [her] creativity,” that came out of graduate school design study. She explains, “In undergrad, I learned a lot more about flooring concepts, and activating spaces, but graphic design in my master’s was kind of how I re-learned how to apply those foundations in a digital landscape, and loved it. … I was in this digital space, working with computers, working with digital tools to create. I had to really learn it because I was teaching it, too!” she said, reflecting on how the teaching component that goes into receiving graduate school funding accelerated her learning. “[Teaching] made me really dig into the foundation and core of graphic design and forced me to self-teach, to stay a step ahead of everything.”
As Moore Harjo continued her academic studies, continuing straight into a doctorate thesis at the advice of her mentors, she kept making and selling jewelry, refining her skills with the laser cutter, and has never stopped. She said that her chief inspiration has been envisioning what an Osage woman would wear, and creating pieces that are fun but also sophisticated. Innovation has been a drive as well, rather than a traditional or past archival focus. “At the time, contemporary Native was not trending in the way it has in recent years, so I didn’t have a constant source of external inspiration. I didn’t really have those examples to look for,” she said, and “I’ve never used other people’s designs, I just use what I know. All my art is original.”
After she graduated with her Ph.D., she delved into the freelance design world and said yes to every project that came her way, even as she took on a job as a full-time professor at Rogers State University. Being a minority teacher and professor who was able to support students who needed her was meaningful, but the teaching schedule took a toll of her artistic practice, she said. “I just missed doing my personal expressions, and I couldn’t do both.” She decided not to pursue a tenure track position, in order to prioritize creative work.
In part, because of that decision to prioritize art, Moore Harjo has had prints and art commissioned by museums and expanded her design and jewelry brand Weomepe into wearable art. Last year, she created an installation in the State Capitol that resonates with tribal people independent of their backgrounds. The RFP for the Capitol project held the directive that her designs should represent all 39 tribes, which she felt was perhaps impossible; but she knew she could design and create in a way that may resonate with Indigenous people, no matter where they are from. “With the work I’m doing, and the applications I’ve been exploring, there are ways,” she said.
The capitol project allowed Moore Harjo to return to the practice of activating spaces that she learned in her architectural degree, and she has since flexed her skills further in this area by contributing to the master plan concept designs for the new Osage Nation Museum redesign, along with Jon RedCorn. The design concepts of activating space also factored into her public art mural Foundation of Remembrance, with the Iowa Department of Transportation, which provides representation for Native people in an area as accessible as a rest stop.
Providing a sense of identity that is visible in public spaces motivates Harjo, who said she strives to provide representation to the next generation that she did not have growing up. She proposed a public art project raising Native Nations visibility in Tulsa, along with fellow artists Elisa Harkins, Alex Ponca Stock and June Carpenter, who were all selected to contribute ideas for a monument representing Indigenous communities that were originally in the area. Two years ago, the four artists proposed projects through the International Site of Consciousness, which Moore Harjo intends to follow up on. “The original idea for that was just to propose these concepts and hopefully somebody would pick it up and fund it,” she said.
Continuing the Journey
Of all the applications of her art and design practice, Moore Harjo was most intimidated by her first venture into fashion. “That stumbled into my lap,” she said. “One day I was asked to be in a fashion show and I was like, ‘What? I’m not a fashion designer. Are you sure?’” This was in 2021, when a committee member working on the First Americans Museum grand opening asked her to show her t-shirts and jewelry, at the least.
“They said I could just show my t-shirts and my jewelry, but for me that was a big deal, to be in that space with that type of event; I did not want to do just t-shirts and jewelry.” At the time, Moore Harjo had recently begun to experiment with designing fabrics, so with some trepidation, she decided to say yes and try her hand at designing fashion for the FAM show. “It still feels weird for me to say I am a fashion designer,” she reflects, but her work has earned comparisons to the “wearable art” made by Jamie Okuma.
Lily Gladstone has worn Weomepe’s earrings and clothing at New York and Hollywood events, and she is gaining visibility. That said, Moore Harjo is careful to acknowledge the clothing part of her fashion line, Weomepe, is collaborative. “I’m not fully sewing these things,” she said. “I collaborate with artists to create these visions.”
With the Weomepe brand now active in the fashion space for several years, she is gaining confidence. Growth is possible she says, and she has some desire. “I’m at a point now where I am wanting to go into that area on my own, just because I have a lot of ideas. … I see a lot that I want to do.” She had always wanted to have a storefront, and Moore Harjo ventured into the retail space in the 2023-2024 holiday season, launching the collaborative Indigichic pop-up run with fellow Osages Veronica Pipestem and Alex Ponca Stock and featuring work by Harjo, Pipestem, and Ponca Stock as well as Katelynn Pipestem, Wendy Ponca, Ted Moore Jr. (Jessica’s father), Jasmine Phetsacksith, Hud Oberly and Mary Hammer.
Opening the Indigichic storefront — which is connected to the Tulsa gallery Southwest Trading Post on Peoria — was an opportunity to see what it would look like to sell items beyond the online store, and Moore Harjo loved it. “It’s great. It was planned but it wasn’t something that I thought would happen this fast,” she said of the pop-up, which Pipestem announced at the 2023 EMPOWERED fashion show Moore Harjo put together with sister Erica Pretty Eagle Cozad—yet another accomplishment in what appears to be a dizzying career schedule.
The EMPOWERED show will return in 2024, and the sisters plan to include Cherokees in the designer lineup, which were the only tribe missing from the Osage-Creek-Cherokee tribal lands of Tulsa where the show took place last October 2023 at the Osage Casino in Tulsa. Moore is keenly watching the Native fashion world’s development and said she and her sister Erica have long talked about putting on a fashion show together. The opportunity to do so came when a Native-run New York fashion week event Weomepe was scheduled to show in failed to communicate with models or designers in any semblance of a timely manner, leading Moore Harjo and other Osages committed to the show to cancel.
Moore Harjo and Cozad were game to organize a backup plan. “She’s been in the fashion world longer than me, in modeling,” Harjo said of her sister, “and so she’s made mental notes over the years of if she ever put on a fashion show, how she would do it. … it comes from the mistreatment of models and how they are housed at these events, and not paid, and treated.” Cozad had a long list of things to do and never do at a fashion show, and Moore Harjo had begun accumulating her own list as well. “Unfortunately, there are mistreatments of designers, too,” she said.
As the NY Fashion Week planning fell apart, a Tulsa fashion show planner also lost logistical momentum and turned to Moore Harjo to see if she would take charge of a flagging fashion show concept. As a natural leader who is kind, communicative and friendly, Moore Harjo didn’t hesitate. “I brought Luana Strike Axe Murphy [in], and we planned something in about three weeks. Because Erica and I had discussed all these points prior, and I had a budget [from New York travel plans], we worked to see if the show was feasible. We didn’t want to throw something together,” she said, “but we got the funding through sponsorship. Fortunately, being involved and networking through all these different pillars I’ve been involved with, I’ve been able to reach out and ask for help. … it just kind of came together in a good way.”
Moore Harjo and Cozad were able to include most everything on their list of dream fashion show do’s and don’ts, and they plan to expand next year to tentatively showcase different designers in two nights of runway events, both featuring more live musicians as well as an after-show social event.
Resisting Restriction
As a fashion and graphic designer, a public artist, former professor, and a business owner, Moore Harjo resists the impetus to do or be known for only one area. She has embraced the title of interdisciplinary designer to portray a digestible public-facing sense of her work and says that she is an artist first. “‘Artist’ gives more freedom. Artist and Designer. Designer, to me, is always about problem-solving and functionality.”
Graphic design is still finding its place in the fine arts world, and Moore Harjo will be there to help all the artistic developments. “There’s still more space to grow,” she said and shared that she is helping to reformat the guidelines for the Muscogee Art Market to include artists working with computers. “I want to help grow that in good ways that are encouraging the future artist and younger artists that are in this field, to be confident in being an artist themselves.”
Perhaps most impressive of Moore Harjo’s accomplishments has been the development of the skill of creating work that resonates with people other than her own background. “I pride myself on that because it is expanding this contemporary landscape of work,” she said. Of late, Moore Harjo connected to those not of her immediate community by presenting at the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth & Reconciliation, which held a roundtable discussion on understanding racism as a risk factor for atrocity crimes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in December of 2023. International Site of Consciousness put on the event, the same organization that requested Indigenous monument concepts from Harjo and others years ago. “They are working in all these capacities, to do this greater work to address structural racism,” Moore Harjo said.
The weight of addressing structural racism at the conference was intense, and “heavy,” but Moore Harjo expressed that she learned a lot, and is still processing it. Her presentation centered around how representation is a form of activism helping to make Native people more visible, and showed how interdisciplinary design work can help restore positive representative images to people of color and the Indigenous. “I try to focus on keeping it contemporary,” she said, explaining that modern representations are an important part of restoring positive images.
While Moore Harjo might have fulfilled her dream of becoming an artist and an educator to boot, she is quick to share that she didn’t always have clarity on her path. “People say ‘follow your dreams,’ but I didn’t believe in that, I didn’t have the experience and the outlook that I do now,” she said, and expressed the desire to encourage artists who are just starting out.
As a young person with dreams of being an artist, she pivoted and explored different areas, “intentionally and unintentionally. And that’s okay. More young people need to hear that it’s okay to explore those different passions … if you want to do something, don’t let anyone tell you ‘no.’ Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough. That’s harder said than done … because you’re influenced by so many people surrounding you and telling you what to do all the time, but I want to let them know.”
For those who may be finding over-scheduling to be a challenge, Moore Harjo urges them to evaluate how prospective projects will benefit them, not only financially, but in terms of self-care. “Can I realistically take this on and be okay?’” she advises asking. She also mentions that self-care may need to include scheduling time with your family and saying no.
“I am very transparent with people,” she says and explains why she cannot do what she is being asked to in terms of new projects. In addition to healthy boundaries, she has relied on baths, massage, audiobooks, watching movies, and connecting with the community. “You really have to take care of your mind, body, soul. Your heart. Take time to connect with your family, spouse, and children if you have them, otherwise, your heart is not taken care of. … You have to allow yourself to hug your brain in different ways, other than what you do every day in your career.”
Harjo is considering the possibility of scaling up the scope of Weomepe Designs in the next few years and considers the Indigichic store a test, but is not yet ready to run a storefront on her own. “With four other capable people that are sharing this work with me, it’s very doable,” she said. She added that she would love some interns at some point. “That would give me a chance to help provide my knowledge, and also help me out in the same sense.”
In terms of increasing anti-racist and positive representations, Dr. Jessica Moore Harjo currently has her work at the First Americans Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Oklahoma City’s Automobile Door Tour Alley, Tulsa Art Alley, the Osage Nation Museum, Osage Nation Casinos, and most recent and notably, in a public art installation called ‘People of the Great Sky, Constellations of the Land’ at the Oklahoma State Capitol.
