O 3 Piece Urban Artisan Where Art Thou?
A letter from the founder of 3 Piece Urban Artisan
I've started this post more times than I can count. Every time, I'd get a few lines in and close the laptop, because the honest version required me to say some things out loud that I wasn't ready to say yet.
I'm ready now. Or close enough.
Some of you noticed it got quiet around here. New work slowed. Emails took longer than they should have. I didn't go anywhere. I've just been living through a stretch that rearranged everything without asking me first.
So let me catch you up.
Three buildings
In 2023, I bought a property. Not a house — a property, with three separate structures standing on it.
Sit in that with me for a second. I built a brand called 3 Piece. Three pieces. The whole idea that a thing gets more interesting when it's got more than one part to it. And then I bought three buildings without once doing the math until the paperwork was signed.
I didn't wait to start. I took on all three at once, which anyone who has ever renovated anything will tell you is not the recommended approach. You're supposed to do one. Finish it. Catch your breath. Then start the next.
I have never been especially good at catching my breath.
But I want to be clear about why I did it. These weren't projects. They weren't flips. Each one had a job:
Room for the practice. Real space for the work — to spread out, to print, to make a mess, to let an idea get big before I decide whether it's any good. Anybody who has ever made art on a kitchen table knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Room for my son and my daughter to grow their wings. Not a place to be stuck. A place to launch from. There's a difference, and I wanted to build the difference.
There was dust. There were contractors who showed up and contractors who didn't. There were weeks where the only thing that got finished was a single wall, and I'd stand there looking at it like it owed me money.
They're done. All three. And I'm not going to just tell you that — I'm going to show you. I'm making a video for every room in every building, walking you through why I made the choices I made. Why that color. Why that light. Why the room is shaped the way it's shaped. None of it was arbitrary, and I want you to see the thinking.
That's coming soon.
But first I have to tell you what was happening inside those walls while I was building them.
October 2023
My mother came to live with me.
Her name was Malinda Louise Street George Cook Covington.
Read that name again. Slowly. That's not a name, that's a life. Every one of those pieces was a chapter, a choice, a whole era of a woman.
I'll be honest with you the way I try to be honest in the work: we had been estranged. For a long time. She was in Kentucky for 28 years. I was here. The distance between us was measured in more than miles.
Then she had two DKAs — diabetic ketoacidosis, back to back. If you don't know what that is, know this much: it's the body's alarm system going off at full volume. It's a phone call you don't forget.
And she wasn't just diabetic. She was living with lupus. With dementia. With bipolar disorder. With Alzheimer's.
That's not one illness. That's four different people to keep up with, in one body, in one house, on one day. The lupus that hurt her. The bipolar that had its own weather. The dementia and the Alzheimer's quietly taking her from herself in pieces while she sat right there in the room.
Caregiving is not for the weak. I need to say that plainly, because I don't think we say it plainly enough. It is not a soft thing. It's medications and appointments and 3 a.m. and doing it all again tomorrow with nobody clapping. And in my case, it meant learning to care for a woman I had spent years not speaking to — while I was literally rebuilding the walls around both of us.
The question
One day I asked her a simple thing.
Malinda, what do you love about yourself?
She said she didn't know.
I have built a whole practice out of crowns. Out of queens. Out of taking faces the world declined to center and putting them dead in the middle of the frame — on a coaster under somebody's wine glass, on a tote somebody carries through the world, on a throw across the foot of somebody's bed. I have spent years insisting that these faces are worth looking at.
And the woman who made me, carrying five names and every year of that life, could not name one thing.
I don't have a clean feeling about that. I have all of them at once. But I know it's the reason I make what I make, and I know that from the day she answered me, the work stopped being about beauty and started being about evidence. Proof. Something you can hold in your hand that says: this face was worth it. Somebody looked long enough to be sure.
January 2024
And then, in the middle of all of it, Kodi Reid was born. My grandson.
Four generations of us under one roof. A brand-new person arrived into all that noise and dust and repair like he'd been waiting on us the whole time.
Kodi got to know his great-grandmother. She got to hold him. Whatever else is true about this stretch of my life, that happened, and it happened in a house I built.
April 2025
My mother passed in April 2025.
I tried to save her. I want to write that sentence and leave it alone, because it's the truest thing I've got and I'm still working out what to do with it. I brought her here. I fought for her. And ultimately she didn't make it, and there's a part of me that has to keep learning — some days hourly — that both of those things can be true at once.
She got eighteen months in my house. She got Kodi. After all those years apart, she died somewhere she was known.
That's not nothing. Some days I can’t even believe it.
The new work: Ola Mae and Guyula
So here's what I'm building now.
The new work is for my grandmothers.
Ola Mae, my maternal grandmother. Guyula, my paternal grandmother.
Two women. Two lines that ran straight through me and out the other side to Kodi. I never got to ask them what they loved about themselves. I don't know what they would have said. Maybe they would have answered like my mother did.
So I'm answering for them.
That's what this work is. Not decoration. Not a pretty face on a cushion. It's me going back up the line with a crown in my hands, for the women nobody thought to ask, and saying it out loud on their behalf — in a house they never saw, for a baby they never met, with their names in my mouth.
Ola Mae. Guyula. Malinda.
Three buildings. Three generations under one roof when it mattered most. Three pieces.
I didn't plan that. I'm just the one who has to live inside the rhyme.
What's next
Renovations: done. Room tours: coming, one video at a time, so you can see why every choice got made.
The new work: coming, and I've never been more sure of what it's for.
Thank you for being patient with me while life was lifing.
It's still lifing. But so am I.
— Jacquelyn
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