John “Jahni” Thomas Moore, born June 20 in Huntsville, Alabama, is an African American artist and art collector. With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from Alabama A&M University, Jahni has worked as an art instructor for years, teaching kindergarten to the college level, while maintaining a busy schedule as a prolific artist. When he “got to a place with art where I wanted to go deeper,” he studied at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned an MFA in studio arts in 2019. His public work is well known in Huntsville, where his first mural from 1999 is still on exhibit at Early Works Children’s Museum. One of his most well-known pieces, commissioned by Google Fiber, is the “Space Is Our Place” mural at Campus 805. “Space is our Place” was recognized in Parade Magazine as the best mural in Alabama in 2019. He has also painted murals in Chicago, Seattle, and South America and has won many awards for both creative and humanitarian accomplishments. He believes that creativity should be an integral part of any effective educational and healing process. Social commentary is a central theme to his artwork. Moore says, “Alabama, the place where I made my entry on this plane, resplendent with winding roads, cresting hills, rolling rivers, towering pines, reaching oaks, and the smell of magnolia, honeysuckle, and sassafras is also the haunt of a dank history of injustice and subsidized gains. Behind the sounds of summer cicadas and crickets echo the voices of many thousand gone into the grave starved of freedom. That is the oxymoronic nature of this state I call home. It’s a place where my deep brown baby feet first hit that terra rossa; that red clay, rich with the blood of my ancestors. My roots run deep here and subsequently I continue to plant my influence and spread the seeds of, resurrection and redemption, and restoration through art.”