fftc:FWD Artist Spotlight
J. Stacy Utley
“Black Philanthropy” Folio Cover Art
About The Artist
Artist / Company
J. Stacy Utley
BIOGRAPHY
J. Stacy Utley is a Charlotte-based public artist, architect, and educator whose work explores cultural memory, identity, and the built environment. Trained as an architect at North Carolina State University’s College of Design, with an MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design, Utley merges spatial thinking with visual narrative to examine how cities are shaped and who they are shaped for, with a particular focus on Black and Brown communities navigating displacement and change.
His public art commissions include projects with the City of Raleigh, Charlotte City Center Partners, and the Arts & Science Council, and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Utley is represented by SE CLT Gallery and maintains a studio practice in Charlotte, NC, alongside his work as an arts educator.
Cover Art for “Black Philanthropy” → Visit The Folio
"Seen”
Artist Statement
Seen extends an ongoing body of work that examines how cities are built and who they are built for. My practice sits at the intersection of art and the built environment, using the language of architecture, including structure, scale, and spatial hierarchy, to visualize the human consequences of urban development, particularly within Black and Brown communities in transition.
This piece was created as cover art for a folio addressing Black philanthropy, and the title reflects the aspiration at the center of that work: to be seen, fully and rightly, rather than reduced to a statistic, a case study, or a recipient. Philanthropy at its best moves toward that kind of seeing, meeting people not as categories in need of intervention, but as communities with history, agency, and value already intact.
The palette is drawn directly from mid-20th-century redlining maps, using red, yellow, and blue, the same color logic once used by lenders and municipalities to grade neighborhoods by “risk,” a practice that formalized decades of disinvestment along racial lines. I return to this coding deliberately. What was once used to mark communities as lesser becomes, in this piece, the visual structure that holds and frames them. The color is not decorative; it is historical evidence repurposed.
Set within and against that coded field is the house, a recurring figure throughout my work and the emotional and conceptual center of this piece. The house is never simply architecture here; it stands in for the idea of home itself: shelter, belonging, permanence, and the right to claim a place as one’s own. Positioning the house against the redlining palette holds two truths in the same frame: the historical mechanisms that determined who could call a place home, and the enduring resilience of the communities who did so anyway.
Seen does not resolve that tension. It asks the viewer, and by extension the reader of this folio, to hold it, to recognize that the communities most often positioned as recipients of philanthropy are also communities with deep histories of self-determination, care, and home-building, long before and often despite outside intervention. To truly see a community is the necessary first act of any meaningful giving.