How Renegade Babe Began
Field Notes, Entry One
Women’s March on Washington, January 21, 2017 — the day a movement became a mirror. Photo: Jeni Jenkins
Renegade Babe did not begin as a business.
It began as a survival response.
In 2016, I watched the United States elect a man who made his hatred of women, Black people, immigrants, poor people, and the planet a brand. I watched a culture I thought was evolving reveal that the violence was always there — just waiting for permission to speak plainly.
I broke.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically.
My body remembered old terror.
The election didn’t create the wound — it triggered one I had learned to function inside of: the wound of being a mixed-race girl who grew up poor in this country, the wound of surviving intimate partner violence, the wound of being told repeatedly through culture and systems that we are disposable, interchangeable, forgettable.
I fell into a darkness that nearly erased me.
But then — I marched.
January 21, 2017.
Washington, D.C.
Hundreds of thousands of women, femmes, queers, elders, kids, activists, lovers, survivors, all of us packed shoulder to shoulder in the streets, chanting with a grief that sounded like fire learning to speak again.
I didn’t go to feel hopeful.
I went because I needed to know whether I was alone.
And I wasn’t.
Something ancient moved in me that day.
Not inspiration.
Not optimism.
Recognition.
A knowing:
We are many.
We are not done.
We are not powerless.
And I am not finished.
Definition Cards GIF: “Renegade Babe definition cards — the language of creative resistance and rebirth.”
That was the seed.
Not a business plan.
Not a strategy.
A cellular level yes.
Over the next year, I clawed my way back into my life. I went to therapy. I learned what trauma had done to my nervous system. I rebuilt my identity piece by piece. And when the fog began to lift, I asked myself a question:
What do I know how to do that builds power?
I know how to make images.
I know how to tell stories.
I know how to build identity and narrative.
I know how to make people feel seen.
And I know — deep in my bones — that creative work is not ornamental. It is structural.
It shapes how people see themselves.
It shapes what we believe is possible.
It shapes collective power.
Renegade Babe came from that knowing.
Not as a brand — as a practice.
Not as a shop — as a language.
Not as a product line — as a commitment:
To use art, design, and storytelling to build community power
from the ground up,
from the inside out,
with the people who are already doing the work.
Over the years, that commitment became a studio.
It became murals, posters, workshops, collaborations, and public projects.
It became relationships — the real kind.
It became memory-keeping.
It became belonging.
And now, it is becoming the Northside Designer & Artist-in-Residence —
the formalization of a role I have already been living.
This is where Renegade Babe was born:
in the fire, in the grief, in the march, in the remembering, and in the return.
This is not a brand story.
It is a myth of survival and emergence.
And we’re just at the beginning.
