When you say the name Grace Jones, countless iconic images of the fearless, genre-bending, artist come to mind. From her distinctive looks to her jaw-dropping live performances to her rightful feature on Beyoncé’s “MOVE”, Grace has remained a standard for what it means to leave a mark on Black culture.
As a pioneer in many forms of self-expression, her boldness continues to inspire new generations of artists, such as multi-talented artists Ni’jai and Marla Lou. The duo accompanied by a team of creatives, paid homage to Grace Jones in an editorial series “From Love With Grace,” capturing Jones’ spirit with a new age lens. To further explore the project’s inspiration, we got a chance to talk to featured model, award-winning performer, creative producer, and founder of Claim Our Space Now, Marla Lou.
Marla Louissaint (aka Marla Lou) is a Haitian-born visionary featured in Netflix’s Seven Seconds and Showtime’s Flatbush Misdemeanors, a creative producer for Theatre Producers of Color ’23, an internationally published model seen in Vogue Italia, Oprah Magazine, and SavagexFenty, and a community organizer.
Through her abolitionist resource hub and movement, Claim Our Space Now, she focuses on ritualizing community action and care to dismantle white supremacy and save all Black lives. Marla’s overall mission is to harness her power unapologetically through art, pleasure, and community healing to define the future of Black history.
In an exclusive interview with GROWN, she shares how her culture and Grace Jones’ legacy impacted her creative journey.
How has your culture shaped your voice as a creative? When did you feel your culture start to merge with the message you wanted to give with your art?
I call myself a liberator and a creative, making sure that we’re able to not only learn, but also radically dismantle the systems that we’re up against in our daily lives because it’s not gonna happen overnight. It’s gonna take some ritualized care together to make that work. I was raised in New York City. Coming up undocumented [as an ex-Jehovah’s Witness] in Washington Heights is something that’s a part of my story as well. It’s an ongoing reclamation of self.
In terms of shaping my voice, when I left the witnesses, that was when I realized, I left my entire Haitian community. And so trying to bridge the gap and find my voice amidst the pandemic, because the world shut down maybe 2 years into my liberation of the witnesses, and trying to stay in touch with the ancestors helped me develop that creative voice.
And now getting into Grace Jones, I’ve always loved Grace Jones because I feel like she represents this full spectrum of a person. How do you navigate embracing all of yourself on a big spectrum of all that you can be, and then find that connection to Grace?
Growing up in New York City, I think I’ve been exposed to a lot in my day to day. I was going from school to playing bass and instruments through my early adult life, so balancing a lot was just something that I had to do. Especially as I was playing a double life as a Jehovah’s Witness in one way at home, and then one way at school, [I was] juggling different ways of being and existing to survive. I think and I know that Grace Jones could definitely empathize with this because to be able to transform and be a force of nature, it takes a lot of energy to muscle up, to exist in those ways fully.
So, you know, it’s taken 26 years to find what may seem like balance. That grace and being able to hold my head up high, that’s very much from the tradition that my mom raised me in. I’m glad that those channels of expressing myself, whether it’s through song, through muse work and modeling or my abolitionist work too as a community organizer, it all gives me the channel to express and explore different versions of myself.
Why did you pick Grace Jones? When did you start loving her work?
I’d say [her] central liberation, through gender and expression. She, they, goddess, and pharaoh, are the pronouns that I use very, very openly and freely. It also comes from the multiplicities and not fitting in any box that’s beyond the binary, beyond any colonized version of ourselves. For my entire life, I’ve been very much enamored by the natural world, and now I’ve finally been able to find where it’s coming from.
To be an icon, it’s timeless because we’re constantly shedding and transforming and becoming reborn again and again. So rebirth is another thing that I would probably raise as something that I hope comes through with the many different looks that we’re able to achieve with this shoot.
What advice would you give to fellow multi-hyphenates, in today’s time? Because I feel like we’re all so overwhelmed, overstimulated, and don’t know which passion to do more of.
Hyphenate is a little not specific enough for me. It’s powerful to be able to show up as you myself. So, if I can offer that as part of how I express myself and introduce myself, it would be as a multi-powered creative.
But I would say that the biggest piece of advice is, to have a project manager. There are so many tools out there that help keep us organized. It’s one thing to have many ideas fleeting as an artist and creative, but what gets us to the next level is being able to have a way to manage through it all. So I would have a project manager, build a team, and ask for help!
Those are things I learned in the last 3 years, having a vision as large as Claim Our Space Now, and not having any entrepreneurial experience. From the jump, I was like I have a vision, there’s no way we can just stay idle by looking at these hashtags and thinking that we can only do this in cycles as opposed to being consistent in our work to care for one another. That’s how we build abolition, that’s how we destroy systems we’re up against.
And then my third bullet of advice (laughs) you’re going to make mistakes. That’s what life is about. I call them little steps on the journey instead as opposed to mistakes I should say, because we weren’t born knowing it all and we never will be. We are too expansive to try and be perfect.”
See more photos from “From Love With Grace” below:
TEAM CREDITS
Photographer: Ni’jai
Model: Marla Louissant
Makeup Artist: Rachel R.
Fashion Stylist: Danny Stylez
Creative Directors & Set Designers: Ni’jai & Tay Solèy
Creative Assistant: Da’jon B. & Corinne W.
