Artist Spotlight: Jackson McBrayer

“If you’re passionate about it, then there is a way to make it your career”

Jackson McBrayer discovered his talent and love for stand up comedy upon his first performance in 2006, pursuing it while picking up more passions along the way. His transition into poet was just as innate, leading him to teaching poetry as a Bay Area Creative teaching artist while continuing his stand up routines. Much of Jackson’s comedy and poetry centers on being disabled in an ableist society, using art as means to subvert his audience’s assumptions.

Jackson’s career in comedy was spurred on by a spontaneous decision encouraged by friends after years of deliberating over trying stand up. His first routine changed his life, Jackson commenting “I immediately fell in love with being on stage. I was like, oh, this is my thing”. A large influence being his large Italian family, growing up in a vibrant environment in which he was the same. His love for the stage extended to slam poetry in which he’d begin to write and perform in an entirely different medium. Jackson recognizes not just the difference between comedy and poetry but the similarities as well. Often he turns his standup routines into poems, just shifting the tone and form of the material. He believes “no matter what art form I'm using to tell my story, I think that turning our good and bad emotions into something beautiful has value”.

Of his motivations and messages within his art, Jackson is eager in subverting people’s expectations and assumptions that they project onto him. His life is filled to the brim with skydiving trips, mosh pit surfing in his wheelchair, performing in front of hundreds, and dancing in the middle of a dance floor. He expresses these moments in his comedy and poems, with the belief that poetry can be more than sad or heavy but about the happiest moments of his life. Jackson’s art celebrates himself just as much as he uses it to process or cope with sad moments in his life. He states: “I talk a lot about my victory moments because I think that there's a culture around disability”.

“Be the teacher you wish you had.”

When working as a teaching artist, Jackson describes how he is often the first disabled person that children and even most adults will develop a relationship with. He wants them to build assumptions based on him and his stories, that “disabled people can do everything”. Jackson’s transition into teaching felt natural to him having coached wheelchair basketball previously. When teaching, he’s motivated by the desire to create a fun, open atmosphere for his students. Jackson describes the importance of seeing kids' silliness and playfulness not as a negative but as a positive. He encourages class clowns to make jokes that they can write into their poetry rather than discouraging them and celebrates their desire to make their peers laugh. Poetry is a way for students to not only express their trauma or their negative emotions but create art that can be full of joy. Jackson wants his students to be genuine to themselves and share their voice. He believes in the impact he has as a teacher to make sure his students believe in themselves and their ideas.

“[My] reason to be a performer is [that] I think differently and my perspective has value.”

Jackson pushes forward that we should be genuine to ourselves and that art is a way to do so. His role as a teaching artist has become indispensable in his journey as a poet, comic, and individual. No matter what he writes about, Jackson writes with the intention to move his audience whether it be to make them laugh or cry. From his strong, twenty year career in the Bay Area comedy scene to his new found exploration into visual art, Jackson is always finding outlets to express his creativity.