Yasmeen Henderson: Multitalented artist channeling personal vulnerability to re-form community

Meet Yaz. Yasmeen Henderson is an artist and musician living in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood commissioned through WaterMarks to create an art project for Lindsay Heights. She has survived family trauma and tragedy in a way that positions her to use art to empathize with young people who face struggles that are difficult to express.

“My mom was killed when I was 20,” she says. “So, that was pretty tough. It really just disconnected me from myself, my life.”

She had already left home at age 16—she describes abuse in her childhood household—but before then her mother and grandparents had encouraged her artistic endeavors growing up in Milwaukee. Her passion for singing extended to several choirs throughout her high-school years. Art and music was an outlet.

But her mother’s death and subsequent family home foreclosure shut everything down—creatively and emotionally.

Into her twenties, Yaz eventually found a place in the Milwaukee music community. She started singing in a band and loving it. But the music scene led to a cycle of performance and partying that Yaz says “landslided into a little bit of alcoholism.”

“We were always at some bar getting some drinks for free or whatever,” she says. “I had all this subconscious grief that I had to deal with. I’ve never been a person who has to be outwardly sad. You wouldn’t see me crying at bars. I was partying and focusing on how to have fun and not deal with this ever.”

At one point, a friend moving to New York gave her art supplies including clay, easel, oil paints, and multiple canvases. Armed with these tools, Yaz found herself forming a healthier habit. She let go of the music scene and quit drinking. Making art became her therapy. She would go Live on Facebook and just draw. Drawing led to painting. Painting led to more complex pieces.

“The longer my sobriety continued, the more intricate my art was getting and I started painting more. That became a very positive outlook for me, something to focus on.”

Part of her grief journey included creating pieces that could not be contained within a conventional square canvas. In one instance Yaz wanted to cut out the shape of a shark she was making for her husband. “I went to Bliffert’s and I was like, hey, you guys have a saw I can use?” Her inquiry led to someone who let her use his saw and was so impressed with her newfound prowess that he gifted the saw to her. The saw became an instrument of power, craft, and creativity.

Yaz kept creating. She noticed, though, that what she was painting was characters that were vividly colored but who were suppressing emotion. “They were just not giving anything, all super devoid of emotion,” she says. “It was a reflection of my need to not feel all [that] negative pain, that mask I wore my entire life, at school, with friends, at home.”

During the pandemic, Yaz moved from Milwaukee to Chicago where she scoured the scene for artists and allies. She gained an introduction to Sam Kirk, prominent Chicago-based muralist, whose large-scale vibrant murals represent LGBTQIA communities. The connection led Yaz to a project working with Chicago neighborhood kids to create 4-by-4-foot mini-murals that reflected what they thought and felt about their communities. She worked with kids from age 3 to 17 in a number of neighborhoods over several months.

In Chicago, she found a passion for working with kids, many of whom were facing trauma that feels inescapable—lost loved ones, drug addictions, gun violence, the grind of racism and poverty. While their mini-murals were objects of communal uplift, Yaz says they also allowed the kids a safe space for expressing previously unexpressed fears.

“It is a big part of the puzzle figuring out how you stay joyful when you are in a negative situation growing up,” Yaz says. “I went through all of the trial and error of that, and I think being able to work with kids in that way—subtly about those things—art is a great outlet for that.”

Yaz loved her time in Chicago and felt supported as an artist. People were buying her pieces. She felt involved making a difference and appreciated by the artistic community. But Chicago is also expensive, and ultimately her road led back to Milwaukee, a city with which she has a complicated “bittersweet” relationship—bitter in the past and now working on the sweet.

Back in Milwaukee, her husband was working at Walnut Way’s Designaway in Lindsay Heights. The apparel business wanted a mural for their wall and commissioned Yaz to paint the multicolored piece. “It’s basically two faces on either side,” Yaz says. “One in the center is like a walnut as their brain. Kind of playing off that cartoon where it opens up someone’s brain and it’s like a little nut—but, like, in a positive way!”

So far she has found the WaterMarks work with the Lindsay Heights neighborhood rewarding. “[It] just seemed up my alley,” she says. “The community outreach and engagement mixed with the art, mixed with the cause. It just seemed on the same path I was on when I was [in Chicago].”

Yaz aims to paint more murals and would love to do more community engagement work, especially with kids. She feels her relationship to art has matured. She was able to process her grief through art-as-therapy. Informed by that experience, now she is producing work for others, not just to release her own emotions. “The chapter is closed. That’s a book I can sell. You know what I mean? It’s not me walking through the storyline.”

Is there music in her future? Yaz mentions that Milwaukee music producer Cristian Strehlow has been sending her beats. She’s intrigued by the prospect of flying out to California for a recording session. In late 2022 that was still a future prospect, but it would not be a surprise to hear Yaz’s voice again on the local scene before too long.

Meantime, her singing seems to bubble up from her “authentic self” and provides a family connection. She still recalls the days in her teens singing with her mom in the car, the stereo cranked up. Among other go-to’s, mother and daughter would sing along to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. After Yaz had her own son, Benny, she would sing him to sleep. It was something that came naturally.

In 2022 Benny was 3 years old, and mother and son take care of their Riverwest balcony’s worth of tomatoes and other garden plants. “My son loves to water the plants. I got him a little watering pot. He’s out there asking me to water. He’s so cute, taking his time.”

Through WaterMarks, she’s learned more about the urban gardening and green infrastructure community resources in and around Lindsay Heights—including Walnut Way and Alice’s Garden.

Yaz says she has gotten better recognizing the value she offers as an artist, but also in trusting that she can both contribute to and benefit from existing community partnerships.

“I’m always someone who downplays myself and I’m learning to stop doing that as much,” she says. “This next part of my life is really just finding other people who can help make things happen.”

Yaz prefers face-to-face communication, but you can check out her art at her website or follow her on Instagram: @theyasmeendee.