Greetings, friend.
For the last five years, artist Jennifer Drinkwater has invited folks to tell her what’s good where they live.
To date, two dozen people from eleven communities in Iowa (her current home) and Mississippi (her true home) have taken her up on this offer, which has resulted in over 60 paintings.
A portion of each art sale is donated back to these communities.
Dive into the places Jennifer’s visited so far, explore available paintings or prints, check out her weekly blog, download a free community art toolkit, and sign up for a free art postcard delivered right to your front door.
Jennifer here. Why What’s Good, you ask.
The What’s Good Project began as my attempt to learn from courageous folks doing the often thankless work of making their communities better places to live. Bonus was getting to make art about these stories, which ultimately shifted my default way of thinking.
(I’ve always been a glass-half-empty kind of person. )
Five years in and themes become visible.
Places like the Northwest Mississippi Herald office in Water Valley, Mississippi, that gave a retired Long Island transplant a weekly column so she could meet her new neighbors.
Or the literal and proverbial tables in the stories of working through conflict.
Like the backroom of a coffee shop in Oskaloosa, Iowa, or the front room of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Or the family farm in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, that houses retired horses, including one called Linda Blair for her theatrics, and whose owner can only bear to be away for five days before her heart starts to break.
Funding for The What’s Good Project has been made possible by the Puffin Foundation and by the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University.
The What’s Good Project has been featured in Inspire(d) Magazine, Delta Magazine, Southern Jewish Life Magazine, Iowa Public Radio, and The Little Yellow Building Art Magazine. In 2024, Jennifer received the Visual Arts Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for The Whats’s Good Project.
A Mississippi native, Jennifer Drinkwater decided to pursue art full-time halfway through a 700-mile trek on the Appalachian Trail. She’s spent one year of her life in tents, and currently lives with her husband and their big yellow dog in an almost tiny house in Ames, Iowa.
Jennifer explores how we bring artwork from the studio into the world, and how art-making can both build and shape community. Over the years, she’s helped to organize a community-wide steamroll printmaking event in Perry, Iowa; created installations in restored prairies in Nebraska; collaborated on public art projects in vacant sites on Iowa main streets; spearheaded a community knit-bombing project; and has painted murals with middle school children on a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta and behind City Hall in Perry, Iowa.
If you’ve got a little extra time, read Jennifer Drinkwater: Blending Art and Community to Find the Good in Delta Magazine to discover more of Jennifer’s background and inspiration for the What’s Good Project.