(Photo courtesy Reggien Washington)
The Good Page features positive LGBTQ+ news in Central Florida and Tampa Bay, uplifting and inspiring stories highlighting locals in our community. In this issue, we meet Tampa Bay artist Reggien Washington.
The first art markets she ever attended, she went as a visitor. Washington remembers walking through Felicitous, a coffee shop in Tampa Bay that hosted local vendors, looking at everyone’s work and thinking about what it would take to one day be on the other side of the table.
The confidence to show up with her own art and offer it to strangers felt far away.
She eventually got there. Washington has been drawing since she was a kid in Tampa Bay, and what she’s built since then, a watercolor and digital art practice called Afro Faerie Art, reflects someone who has spent a long time figuring out exactly what she wants to say.
Her pieces place Black people inside fantasy: as fairies, as princesses, as figures rendered soft and mythological in worlds that have historically had no room for them. She describes her work as made for “the earthy and whimsical,” people who haven’t lost their sense of wonder about the natural world. Natural hair, natural bodies, stretch marks, the details that mainstream fantasy has long treated as invisible or incidental, show up in her work as the norm rather than the exception.
Growing up, she drew constantly. Her dad, who can look at anything and reproduce it on paper, taught her how to draw a horse around age five or six. Drawing became an outlet, then a practice, then something she simply never stopped doing. But for years, the figures she drew looked like the ones she was already seeing in the work around her, which is to say, not like her.
The change came gradually, and from somewhere personal. At 18, Washington cut off her hair and started her natural hair journey from scratch. Going through the process of learning how to care for it, she says, was huge.
She started reflecting that experience in her art, and something opened up. She realized she could use illustration to challenge the way Black women and femmes are portrayed, to show them as soft, as beautiful, as fully themselves. That realization is where she found her voice.
“I got to a point where I was like, if I want there to be representation, I have to be the one to make that happen,” she says.
She began making work she wished she’d had as a kid, figures who looked like her, inside worlds that had long excluded people like her, centered not as exceptions but as the natural inhabitants of the frame. She describes making fantasy art featuring Black and queer people as healing in a way she didn’t anticipate.
Her first market was Populum at Coastal Creative in St. Pete. Since then, she’s vended at events across Tampa Bay and sometimes in Orlando, finding community through organizations like Art Noire Gallery, a resource for Black artists, and Attic Cat, which amplifies opportunities for queer and alternative creatives. The Tampa Bay arts scene, she says, has given her peers, mentors and a sense of what it actually looks like to sustain a creative practice over time.
It has also taught her some harder lessons.
A few years ago, she paid $100 to be a vendor at a market that had been promoted as a significant event featuring local artists. Almost no one showed up. She and the other vendors left early, feeling, as she put it, scammed.
What she took from it wasn’t discouragement. It was clarity.
“It was a moment that taught me that my time is valuable as an artist,” she says. “I learned how important it is to vet opportunities extremely carefully. I’m not somehow less of an artist because I don’t show up to every possible event.”
That lesson didn’t come cheaply, and Washington is candid about the mental battle that comes with visibility, the fear of posting and being met with silence, of putting work out and having no one respond. At one of her first markets, a stranger recognized her from Instagram and was eager to buy one of her “F DeSantis” shirts, a politically poignant design about Florida’s governor she’d made. Seeing someone that excited to wear something with her art on it felt like proof of something she was still learning to believe.
Even though she’s been drawing her whole life, she only started feeling proud of the work about two years ago. She’s still closing that distance, one piece at a time, in a city that’s starting to know her name.
You can find Afro Faerie Art on Instagram at @AfroFaerie.art and online at AfroFaerie.com.
Interested in being featured in The Good Page? Email Editor-in-Chief Ryan Williams-Jent at Ryan@WatermarkOutNews.com in Tampa Bay or Central Florida Bureau Chief Bellanee Plaza at Bellanee@WatermarkOutNews.com in Central Florida.
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