Protect the Vision: Why I Take Ownership Seriously
Notes from Indy Arts Global — on law, identity, and building something that can’t be taken
I told y’all in the last dispatch that the recording cut right when the panelist said “and then your background on law…” — and I’d let that be the turning point of the piece.
Turns out somebody was still recording.
Here’s what I actually said when they asked me how the law shows up in the art.
The Crayola Story.
In high school, one of my art teachers told us a story that has stuck with me ever since. She’d taken an idea to her professor — something for Crayola. The professor took the idea and ran it up to Crayola himself.
She was still teaching high school art when she told us the story.
And I remember thinking — dang. She could have been rich. Instead, she’s standing in front of a classroom of teenagers in Detroit getting underpaid, telling us this as a warning.
I wasn’t thinking about lawyers then. I didn’t know any. I didn’t know what an IP attorney was, what a trademark looked like, or what it meant to put something on the record. I just knew that a woman who made something got cut out of what she made, and the story scared me enough to remember it twenty years later.
Then I became a lawyer.
And the story showed up again with a completely different face on it.
On being proactive.
What I told the panel — and what I’ll tell any creator reading this — is that you have to be proactive about the stuff you make. Not paranoid. Proactive.
That doesn’t always mean you have to run out and trademark everything. Trademarks cost money. Filing fees, attorney’s fees, maintenance. Not everybody is in a position to register on day one, and that’s okay.
But if you can’t afford to register it, you can still establish it. Public usage is a legal concept and a cultural one at the same time. Letting people see you use it. Putting your name on it. Posting it. Selling it. Showing it. Putting it in the world consistently enough that when somebody else tries to walk in and claim it, there’s a paper trail that says no, this is hers. This is his. This is theirs. They’ve been doing this.
That’s how you avoid the Crayola story.
That’s how my art teacher could have avoided it.
That’s how a lot of you reading this can avoid it right now, today, before the deal is even on the table.
I don’t say this from a place of fear. I say it from a place of having watched too many creators get cut out of their own work because nobody told them the rules in time.
I’m telling you in time.
On the law showing up in the work itself.
The other thing the law does for me is it shows up in the art.
There are pieces I’ve made that are literally inspired by the law — scales of justice, important figures from legal history, motifs you’d recognize if you’ve ever spent any real time in a courtroom. I lean into it sometimes on purpose.
But here’s the part that surprised me.
People started telling me — without knowing my background — that some of my pieces looked like courtroom sketches. I’ve never drawn a courtroom sketch in my life. Never sat in the back of a hearing with a sketchpad. But people would look at certain figures, certain compositions, certain ways I render the body, and they’d say this feels like a courtroom drawing.
I don’t know if that’s something my subconscious is doing on its own.
What I know is that it’s there. People see it. And I didn’t put it there on purpose.
That’s how you know two things in your life are actually one.
On the impact I want the work to have.
The panel asked me what impact I want my art to hold.
Here’s what I told them, and here’s what I mean.
I treat art as a part of life’s lifestyle. I want it baked into the way you live. I have my own work hanging up in my apartment. I look at it. It gives me energy. It reminds me what I’m capable of when I’m tired, when I’m stretched thin, when the law side of my life is asking me to be in three places at once.
That’s what I want my work to do for other people.
I want it on your wall. I want you to walk past it on a Tuesday morning and feel something. I want a kid in a house I’ll never visit to look up at one of my pieces and decide he can pick up a pencil too.
The goal is worldwide. The goal is for somebody on another continent to see my work in a school, in a home, in a hallway, and feel like the corner reached them.
That’s it. That’s the whole impact play.
Why this dispatch exists.
I’m writing this one because the law-and-art question is the one most artists never get asked, and most lawyers don’t know how to answer.
I’m both. So I’ll answer both.
If you’re a creator reading this and you’ve never put a single thing on the public record under your own name — start today. Post it. Date it. Sign it. Sell it. Show it. Build the trail before you need the trail.
If you’re a creator who’s already got a body of work and you’ve been thinking about trademarks, formation, IP protection, contracts, licensing — that’s literally what I do now. THE CORNER® is built for you.
And if you’re just here for the dispatches — the work is hanging at Indy’s Global Village through May 30th. Pull up.
The Crayola story ends with somebody else getting paid.
Yours doesn’t have to.
— Jaevonn