By Salomé Gómez-Upegui
Photos by Adrian O’Farrill
In Jujmo’s cheerful artworks, color takes center stage. Plants, flowers, animals, and fictional characters are rendered in bright yellow, pink, purple, and green hues, and every detail showcases the artist’s skill to brighten up spaces and inspire joy.
It’s hard to believe that, as a young child growing up in a military family, the Filipino-American illustrator, whose real name is Cheryl Weber, didn’t consider the possibility of pursuing a creative career. Instead, she imagined she’d follow a more practical path. “I wanted to be a veterinarian, I love animals, and though I had an interest in art, I never thought of it as a viable career path for me,” she tells Current.
This began to change in high school when her interest in street art and graffiti prompted her to take her creative interests more seriously by taking additional art classes than those required by the curriculum. It was also during this time she began deepening her interest in murals, though it wasn’t until getting her Bachelor’s in fine arts from the University of South Florida in Tampa that she completed her first mural in a gallery setting as part of her senior thesis project.
Far from being an overnight success, Weber put in the work to be where she is today. “I just really wanted to make it, even though I definitely had to have a second job in service and bartending.” With time, her passion merged with continued efforts to enhance her skills and make herself known, and she began to see results. Nowadays, art fills her entire schedule.
Jujmo’s multifaceted practice is a mix of mural works, commissioned pieces, graphic design, and digital artworks.
Over the past few years, Weber has made a name for herself in Tampa by taking on unexpected projects that infuse everyday objects with her colorful creations. This all started when people began coming to her with interesting customization undertakings which have included embellishing objects such as skateboards, helmets, and even cars. “I don’t know if I would’ve normally done this type of work on my own, says Weber. “But these projects come from people supporting my work and coming up to me when they think something would be cool for me, and that has helped me push my career further.”
Indeed, car murals featuring a range of playful motifs, such as plump artichokes, pretty florals, and mushrooms in her signature rainbow color palette, have become a surprising but intriguing part of Jujmo’s practice.
Weber’s work is highly influenced by folklore and anime, as well as the many countries she lived in and the cultures she was able to absorb as a military child. In particular, the time she spent living in Japan had a significant effect that still shows up in her artistic practice today. “It changed my whole life experience with art and how it exists in everyday life,” Weber says. “There’s a lot of color in Japan and they’re very creative.”
Japan even shows up in the story behind the artist’s whimsical moniker. Weber explains the name can be traced back to her early obsession with graffiti since Jujmo is a blend of two random words she loved to draw: “juju” and “momo.” “I initially came up with Jujmo because it had a nice flow to it, and I found out later that juju means a magical talisman in West African countries and momo means peach in Japanese. So, essentially, my name means magical peach,” she says.
Jujmo says Fafi, a French street artist, illustrator, and designer, who paints female caricatures in bright colors, has had a big influence in her work, and she admire’s that artist’s “tenacity and the way she approaches painting.”
With her kaleidoscopic pieces, Jujmo mainly hopes to elicit reactions of joy and happiness. “I like to make work that is uplifting. Life can be a lot sometimes, and I think my work doesn’t have to go that deep—if it does, that’s cool,” says Weber. “But I genuinely just want to make the world seem brighter, more colorful, and more exciting.”
