Chicago multimedia artist Medusa creates, paints and tattoos worlds within worlds

Medusa is a 29-year-old multimedia artist from Chicago. Photo courtesy of Emilie Robinson.

Fairies and mushrooms. Bugs and castles. Dragons and horses. To say Medusa’s art is whimsical is just one way to describe her work— and it wouldn’t even begin to capture it all.

The 29-year-old multimedia artist and professional tattooer beams with creativity, her mind a playground of characters and worlds waiting to be given life on paper and on skin. 

The artist and creative director, who goes solely by Medusa, casually drops SpongeBob Squarepants references, talks about manga with unfettered enthusiasm and creates elaborate backstories for all of her dainty sprite drawings. “That one’s clumsy,” she says, pointing to her latest sketch.

“I used to watch The Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth,” she says, citing her two favorite movies. “I watched a lot of stuff like that when I was a kid. And I was a big reader.”

“Hold on,” Medusa pauses, turning to the bookcase behind her work station inside Red Devil Tattoo. She rifles through the glossy pages of The Spiderwick Chronicles and a coffee-table sized book on Final Fantasy. 

“That’s what I think about when I’m drawing,” she says excitedly. “I’ve been focusing a lot on fairies and bugs and plants. For a long time I was focusing on mushrooms, just like random stuff.”

Her name is an homage to the mythical Grecian, Medusa, who’s hair was made of snakes. As the story goes, anyone who looked at the Gorgon would turn to stone.

“It came from me embracing my natural hair,” Medusa says, “because when I first started wearing it like that, I would get made fun of every day.”

“Cyclothmia,” by Medusa.

At the time, Medusa was just a teenager, and the natural hair movement hadn’t yet gone mainstream.

“People were not very into it,” she says. “But people make fun of [things] because, low-key, it's something they wish they could do. When you don’t back down, even though people are giving you a hard time, it gives other people confidence. So I had to really stand on, ‘This is my hair, this is what I’m going to do.’ My hair is really curly, so these are my snakes. And they aren’t going anywhere.”

Medusa was born on the Westside of Chicago near East Garfield Park, but moved often. “I was in every part of the city,” she says. “I didn’t live in a nice neighborhood so my parents wouldn’t really let us off the block.” 

Growing up, Medusa earned straight A’s and was enrolled in her schools’ gifted programs. “That was also kind of different,” she says. “I feel like people put kids who are in those classes on a different pedestal, especially if you are in a marginalized neighborhood. So it kind of felt isolating.”

Those early years were formative. Medusa didn’t exactly fit in, so she retreated to the inside of her mind. She’d get in trouble at school for doodling on her arms in Sharpie, or for thinking too outside the box in classes where everyone was meant to stay inside.

“I feel like I was able to see a lot of different things and get out into the world earlier than most people would,” she says of growing up in Chicago. 

Medusa paints, draws, tattoos and practices the hula-hoop.

As a teenager she would frequent the Harold Washington Library Center (HWLC), specifically the YOUmedia program, where high school kids throughout the city rent laptops and cameras and get free hands-on experience in art, digital media, STEM and more. 

“Chance The Rapper talks about YOUMedia a lot and how they helped him. It’s such a good resource,” she says. 

Back then, Medusa would ditch school to hang out with her friends at HWLC where she could learn about painting, photoshop and photography—all mediums she has used and still uses in her art. 

“A lot of the schools I went to didn't have any art programs, but I always wanted to be an artist, ever since I was a really little kid,” Medusa says. “But it’s just not something people really push you into. Even though I've been making art my whole life, I don't think I ever really got the chance to take it seriously until I was like, ‘I just don’t care about other people’s thoughts about me pursuing this.’”

Medusa attributes YOUmedia to connecting her with people who did push her in the right direction. And it gave her a place where she could meet other kids her age with similar interests. 

“There were a lot of other teenagers who were doing things like me, who wanted to be artists, and they came from better neighborhoods so they actually thought it was possible,” Medusa says. “It made me feel like it was possible, so I was just like, ‘Okay, I’m going to jump on into it.’”

Medusa says she was a “model child” up until high school. 

“I was focusing on school and my plan was to go to an Ivy League. But I was having a lot of at-home problems, so school just became less important to me. I ditched a lot. I got in trouble a lot. The only reason they couldn’t kick me out was because my grades were so good.”

Logan Beck as Joe the clown from Medusa’s upcoming film, “FOOLISH.”

Medusa graduated and enrolled in an art school for college, but that was stifling, too. 

“I was just like, ‘This is taking all the joy out of why I wanted to make art in the first place.” So she went back to the drawing board, sometimes juggling two to three jobs at a time while pursuing her art on the side. 

In 2016, Medusa bought her first tattoo machine. She tattooed real skin on the same day.

An old friend and house tattooer gave her “some of the best, most hood advice I've ever gotten in my life,” she says. 

“He said, ‘Just take two styrofoam plates, stack ‘em on top of each other, draw your picture, and if you poke through that first styrofoam plate and hit that second one, you’re going too deep.’” 

Medusa bought a machine and some paper plates that day, and by the end of the night had already tattooed her first human volunteer. 

“I didn't know anybody who was a legitimate tattooer,” Medusa says, adding how nerve-wracking the process really was. Having no real training, Medusa would tattoo someone, have a panic attack and then swear-off tattooing—until the next customer called. 

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Medusa says in all sincerity. “I have anxiety and depression, but at the time I didn’t know that. Someone would just hit me up and they’d convince me to do it and the cycle just kept repeating itself. Then I stopped tattooing for a couple years.”

Medusa’s early years were turbulent. On her own since she was 16, she juggled multiple jobs across the city while relying on public transportation, and only worked on her art during bus rides to and from work. 

Eventually she got her footing, landing jobs in retail management where she thrived. And then Covid happened. 

Medusa was laid off but for the first time in her life had the bandwidth to focus on her art without having to worry about holding down a job. 

And then a friend hit her up for a tattoo.

A back tattoo by Medusa.

“At that point, [I was like], alright fine, I’ll do the fucking tattoo,” Medusa says.

She posted a photo of the finished tattoo to her Instagram account when someone else reached out for one. Before she knew it, Medusa was tattooing people out of her home on a bean bag chair every day.  

Medusa’s online following grew, and eventually she was offered an apprenticeship at a now-defunct tattoo shop in Logan Square. But Medusa was reluctant. 

“The few times I got tattooed [in a shop] was very uncomfortable to me,” she says. “Tattooing is a very white-dominated thing and I’m like, a poor Black girl. I don’t know anything about the culture of tattoo shops. They’d just treat me like shit, so I was just like, ‘I do not feel comfortable in shops, I do not ever want to be in a shop.’ I just didn’t think it was possible.”

But it was. Medusa eventually landed a full-time gig as a tattoo artist at her current shop, Red Devil Tattoo in Old Irving Park, and she hasn’t looked back since.  

“That is still a very surreal thing to me that people come in and are so excited [to get tattooed by me],” Medusa says humbly. “I should do a better job at celebrating those little successes. But when I think about what I want out of life, what I plan to accomplish before I leave the earth has not been accomplished yet.”

Tattooing, Medusa says, is just one medium under her multimedia umbrella. The artist paints, draws, hula-hoops, and has also made short films, hosted art shows and installations across the city, and has aspirations to write and illustrate her own books and publish her own manga. 

Her latest film, “FOOLISH,” is planned for release this summer to celebrate her 30th birthday. 

A finished tattoo by Medusa.

The film, which follows a clown named Joe, is based on the time in Medusa’s life when she was working as a manager at the shoe retailer Dr. Martens.

“I was really good at my job but it wasn’t what I wanted to do and it wasn’t something I really cared about,” she says. “Over time it was just so draining because I knew what I wanted to do; but when you’re completely independent you have to do what you have to do to take care of yourself. So it’s based on my own struggles, knowing what I wanted out of life, but at the time it felt not achievable.”

Even though Medusa is finally able to pause and relish in all her efforts, she rarely does. Instead, the artist is constantly looking to the future, the visions of success ruminating in her mind alongside sparkling fairies and colorful, magical mushrooms. 

“I’m a very goal-driven person and I know what I want, so I'm going to go after that in every capacity that I’m capable of,” Medusa says. “This is what I’m put on this earth to do.”

For more information on Medusa, visit her website at medusartist.com. Photo courtesy of Emilie Robinson.