Justina Blakeney
Guest Curator
Photo Credit: Frank Frances for Ruggable
“Art isn’t just something you look at—it’s something you experience.”
Justina Blakeney is a designer, artist, New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of Jungalow. Though her career is kaleidoscopic, everything she makes grows from the same soil: a belief that the home should be a haven where creativity, color, culture, and spiritual connection nourish us. Lately that looks like Grow, an oracle deck and guidebook she co-wrote with her mother, developmental psychologist Dr. Ronnie Blakeney, and a new rug collection with Ruggable made for people who treat color like a love language and home like a self-portrait.
That outlook shapes how she thinks about bringing art home. Not a stagnant object on the wall, but an experience unfolding with all the life that surrounds it. An artwork is shaped by the paint color behind it and the plants crowding in beside it, by who you are the year you hang it and who you’ll become a decade later. “That relationship evolves over time,” she says, “and I think that’s one of the greatest joys of living with art. You can measure how you’ve grown and changed by how your relationship with your art changes.”
In other words, living with art isn’t passive. It’s a conversation that keeps going.
Photo Credit: Jungalow
“I’ve always been drawn to art that reminds me that we’re part of nature.”
If you’ve ever saved a space featuring Justina’s designs to your moodboards, you’ll recognize them instantly by their unmistakable berry and earth-toned palettes, comforting textures, and lush botanical motifs. But where does Justina’s eye come from? It’s rooted in the same worldview that draws her to the natural world. Growing up between cultures taught her that meaning is made through relationships, not in isolation. Just as in nature, nothing and no one exists on their own.
Applied to art, a painting reads one way in an all-white room and entirely differently on a limewashed wall with greenery. She gravitates toward art that can strike up a conversation with the rest of the room. “It’s often that little bit of tension—between eras, colors, textures, or patterns—that allows a piece to truly sing.”
Photo Credit: Jungalow
While Justina feels most herself in rooms filled with colorful objects that remind her of the places she’s been and the people she’s loved, her philosophy can be applied liberally. Find what grounds you and trust it. There’s no one right way to create a home or even choose art; the only risk is building a home for someone you’re not. If you pick what you genuinely connect with, your life will feel richer for it.
Photo Credit: Jungalow
Justina didn’t trace the threads running through her collection until the curation was finalized. She simply followed her instincts toward art overflowing with life: blooming gardens, wild animals, fruit, family, myth, and of course, color, color, color. Plus the quality she calls “human-ness”—a little bit quirky, a little bit offbeat.
Follow her lead. Scroll until a work reaches out to you with a memory or a feeling. That flicker of connection is the best reason there is to live with an artwork.
Go Where the Color Is
Girls and a Horse by Ella Jensen
Be Who You Are by Jon Osborne
Flock by Trifon Markov
My Giant Palm by Ella Carty