Juju Berryhill | Art of the Appalachian Experience

Graphite • Photography • Mixed Media • Material Art

My work explores lived Appalachian culture through the ordinary people, places, objects, traditions, and landscapes that carry memory forward. Working across visual art, folklore, history, and material culture, I am interested in the relationship between people and place—and in the places where documentation, scholarship, science, spirituality, and art meet in everyday Appalachian life.

Juju Berryhill | Artist Statement

I work at the intersection of art, folklore, history, and lived Appalachian experience. My practice is rooted in the belief that culture is carried not only through major events and written histories, but through ordinary things: a kitchen shelf, a worn book, a landscape remembered from childhood, the way a home is arranged, a story repeated across generations, or a practice whose meaning survives even when its origin has been forgotten.

My graphite work is particularly concerned with the material and visual language of Appalachian life—domestic spaces and everyday objects, working landscapes, folkways and traditions, mountain environments, and the traces people leave upon the places they inhabit. I approach Appalachia not as something fixed in the past, but as a living culture shaped by memory, adaptation, continuity, and change.

Photography, mixed media, material art, writing, historical research, and oral history extend that same documentary impulse across my work. I draw from archival material, family and community memory, firsthand observation, landscape, oral tradition, and material culture, allowing documentation and creative interpretation to inform one another.

I am especially interested in the relationship between people and place, in preserving the stories found in ordinary things, and in the places where science and spirituality meet in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Appalachian people. My aim is not to romanticize Appalachia or preserve it beneath glass, but to document and interpret a culture that is alive, complicated, changing, and still being made.

About the Artist

Juju Berryhill is a multidisciplinary Appalachian artist, folklorist, historian, and author working across graphite, photography, mixed media, material art, writing, and public scholarship.

Her work grows from a lifelong relationship with Appalachian culture and an abiding interest in how people preserve knowledge through story, objects, landscape, family memory, folkways, and everyday practice. Her visual and scholarly work frequently overlap, each informing the other and creating a practice concerned as much with why people make and remember things as with the things themselves.

Berryhill holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Salem College, an A.A.S. in Medical Laboratory Technology, and an Associate in General Education from Davidson County Community College. Her background in both the humanities and laboratory science informs her particular interest in the places where empirical knowledge, traditional knowledge, spirituality, and creative expression intersect.

Experience

Visual Art & Public Art
Member artist, Art for Art’s Sake (AFAS)
Former gallery volunteer and exhibiting artist, Red Dog Gallery
Exhibited at the Womble Carlyle Gallery at the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts and Studio 7
Returning muralist, AFAS Concrete Canvas Mural Wall
Arts educator and workshop facilitator

Writing, Folklore & Scholarship
Author and independent Appalachian folklorist and historian
Oral-history interviewer and researcher
Published creative and nonfiction writer
Arts and cultural writer
Public speaker and workshop presenter on Appalachian folklore, history, folk practice, and culture
Founder, Appalachian Juju
Publisher, Appalachian Juju Press

Juju Berryhill | Upcoming Engagements

More Than Superstition: Appalachian Folk Practice, Folklore & Living Tradition
September 5, 2026 • 2–4 PM EST
The Green Heron Ale House • Danbury, North Carolina

A public talk exploring Appalachian folklore and folk practice as living cultural traditions rather than relics of the past. Drawing from historical research, oral tradition, material culture, and lived experience, Berryhill discusses the ways knowledge, belief, spirituality, and everyday practice intersect in Appalachian communities.

Public speaking and community education are an extension of Berryhill’s interdisciplinary practice, bringing folklore, history, and cultural scholarship beyond the archive and into conversation with the communities whose experiences they document.

AFAS Concrete Canvas Mural Wall
September 12, 2026 • ARTivity on the Green • Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Berryhill returns as a participating muralist in AFAS’s Concrete Canvas public-art program, continuing her involvement in public art and the Winston-Salem arts community.

Juju Berryhill | Selected Works

Telling the Bees

Graphite on paper • 18 × 8.5 inches

An exploration of the Appalachian and broader folk tradition of “telling the bees,” in which bees are informed of significant events within the household, particularly births, marriages, and deaths. Set against an Appalachian landscape, the work considers the relationship between people, place, the natural world, and the quiet rituals through which communities acknowledge change, grief, and continuity.

Moonshine Holler

Graphite on paper • 24 × 18 inches

A study of the material culture and social landscape surrounding Appalachian moonshining, Moonshine Holler gathers the objects of work, leisure, and daily life into an imagined mountain setting. The still, jars, worn furniture, playing cards, banjo, and surrounding landscape reflect a world in which necessity, ingenuity, community, and tradition existed side by side. Rather than romanticizing illicit distilling, the work considers moonshining as part of a larger story of Appalachian labor, economic survival, place, and cultural memory.

Mamaw’s Kitchen Shelf

Graphite on paper • 12 × 8.5 inches

A study of the Appalachian household as an archive, Mamaw’s Kitchen Shelf gathers the ordinary objects through which knowledge is practiced, preserved, and passed forward. Canning jars, cast-iron cookware, dried plants, almanacs, cookbooks, and well-used kitchen tools speak to foodways, seasonal knowledge, domestic labor, self-reliance, and the accumulated experience of generations. The piece considers material culture not simply as a collection of old things, but as evidence of the everyday lives and knowledge systems that shaped Appalachian homes.

Appalachian Altar

Graphite on paper • 12 × 8.5 inches

Appalachian Altar explores the quiet intersection of faith, household materials, and protective folk practice in Appalachian domestic life. A family Bible rests among ordinary objects that could give prayer physical form and meaning—items gathered, written upon, carried, kept nearby, or incorporated into acts of protection and care. The work considers how spirituality was practiced not only in churches, but at kitchen tables, bedside spaces, and household workbenches, where prayer, practical knowledge, and everyday materials became part of lived tradition.

Artwork & Image Use

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For licensing, reproduction, publication, exhibition, or other permissions, contact: appalachianjuj@outlook.com