JoyXchange

Who We Are

JoyXchange is a community dedicated to building and sustaining a flourishing economy for artists and creatives. Founded on the premise that creativity is the premier active force in the Universe we exist to pump life, resource and access into the community of artists from local proximities to global reach. And yet not just into the artist, but into the synergy of the artist/patron/space relationship wherein new frontiers of expression and communication are forged.

That premise wasn't drawn up in a meeting. It was taught to the founder by two women, decades before there was anything here to attach it to: that creative expression, the development of skill, the awareness of culture and a considerate code of conduct can open opportunities and paths to success beyond our dreams. That creativity could be a way through hard things, not just a way to pass time. That's the whole premise, still: creativity as healing, as livelihood, as leverage — not as luxury.

Where We Came From

JoyXchange didn't start as a business plan. It started forming in 2012, long before the hardest years. Then came real loss — a life-altering accident, Covid, a house fire, the kind of back-to-back knockouts that either end you or teach you everything about what actually matters. Those years didn't create JoyXchange. They made it imperative to give it to the world; there was simply nothing else to do. Out of that came an unexpected life preserver: pulling value out of what other people had thrown away — literally, salvaged materials turned into fountains, lazy Susan tables, furniture, a lamp — and a conviction that the same idea could apply to him, to us. That in spite of our brokenness — no, because of our brokenness — there is a reservoir of unrecognized and intricate immaculate imperfections. He realized we were teeming with beauty. And that there was great value in it if extracted and presented. He realized how many people had treasures in their garages and attics. How much there was to witness and to give, and began digging. Looking for the evidence. The art is the evidence. And it was the sources that needed support.

This isn't a pitch dressed up as a story. It's a lived, iterated system, built slowly and honestly, that we're now ready to bring outside the room it was built in.

What We're Building

A creative economy has to be more than a marketplace. We're building toward communities that can find, mine and refine the value already sitting in their own environment — in what they've accumulated, and in the skills, talents and creativity already present, latent or undervalued but accessible nonetheless.

That means facilities equipped to do the work: recycling, making, producing. Mentorship and funding for creatives who've been counted out or overlooked by the usual gatekeepers. And the infrastructure of a sustainable business handed back to the artists — pricing, production, exposure, accessible sourcing — all of it currently locked behind expensive software and predatory platforms.

But none of that was ever the talent. That part was always yours. Mimicry needs the original to even exist. Origin doesn't. It just deserves refining, and that's the part we do.

We're here to do it different. Not to replace, but to redefine. To reevaluate. And to rebuild.

The Work

Before JoyXchange was a pipeline or a pitch, it was a cast of characters and a habit of turning what was already here into something worth looking at. Here's some of what's already been made.

Narlo

Always watching. Always transmitting. The face of a world that never turns off.

Lord Lazarus Lotus Billinglea

"Lord B" to the merch table. A tuxedoed cat who treats every room like his study.

Phoebe

Half science, half spell. She's still working out which half is which.

Exit Threads & Exit Galleries

The running-man mark, out in the world: over a launch, a reactor, a rainbow, a doorway. Same figure, same exit, every time it's used.

Riot Gear and JXC Aesthetics pieces are already in production — real product photos land here as each collection ships.

The Opus of Man

A multi-medium seasonal series, just beginning to take shape. Each episode tells the story of one thing people take for granted — a t-shirt, a guitar string, a billboard — and follows it through time: how it changed, how we changed with it, what that could mean, and the aesthetics we gave it along the way.

It's about the magic that we wield. How we shape and rework things from pinnacle to pinnacle, over time creating layer upon layer of mastery and mystery to heights that only we can imagine.

Why do we still say “hang up the phone”? And where have all the pay phones gone? We know why. But where are they?

It doesn't have to start in antiquity, but it's always about art. No single medium has been chosen yet — animated, comic, written, and video are all still on the table. What's already settled is the line underneath everything else this becomes: awaken sleeping genius.

This is the thesis behind the mother's house, the murals, the merch, and the story JoyXchange tells in public. More soon.

What's Live Right Now

The first real, working piece of this is already out: the JoyXchange Buffer Engine — a production tool that takes an artist's finished work and turns it into a complete, print-ready package — sized correctly, color-profiled correctly, packaged and named correctly — in minutes instead of hours, with an honest look at what you'd actually keep after fees on any given platform. The point is that it does something. The creative who uses it will know its value the moment they receive their first bundle.

See full pricing & try the Buffer Engine →

Who's Building This

Avien Reese — Atlanta-based artist, poet, and survivor. In 2016, a pedestrian accident fused C1, set screws through C2–C7, and put a rod from knee to ankle in his left leg. In 2022, a house fire took the family home, and then the contractor hired to rebuild it disappeared with the money. JoyXchange had been forming since 2012. Rebuilding through both made it imperative to finally give it to the world.

Before any of that, in 2015, Avien started making merch for Punk Black — an Atlanta-based collective of Black and POC punk, rock, and alternative artists — repurposing old clothes for the merch table. BuzzFeed News covered the scene in July 2019 ("These Pictures Prove That Punk Rock Is Not Dead"), with photos of Avien spray-painting shirts and showing merch alongside the bands.

JoyXchange is named for two women.

Joy Jackson — Avien's grandmother — started by teaching her own daughters to sew. Their friends came, and then their friends, until the house wasn't big enough. So she found a building in Oakhurst, walked into local businesses and told them what she was doing until they funded it, and built the Decatur Girls Club. She took girls from a neighborhood the city had written off to ballets and musicals. She taught them to make things, and then to sell them. She ran cultural fairs where clubs from across the city represented nations of the world, with a parade. When the club got big enough to need a formal director, her husband Mance told her not to let anyone else take the position she created — she'd built it, she should run it. She became its executive director.

Diantha Reese — Avien's mother, Joy's oldest — helped raise those girls before she was grown herself. Georgia State expelled her for a protest. Miles College took her, and she registered voters under a young John Lewis, years before anyone called him congressman. Then thirty years of teaching: Head Start in California first, then special-needs students in Chattanooga, Atlanta, and back out in California — moving whenever her family needed moving, which meant never staying anywhere long enough to earn tenure. She retired with almost nothing. She still works the polls in Oakhurst.

One woman taught a neighborhood to make things and sell them. The other spent thirty years on the kids everyone else had given up on. JoyXchange is the same work, continued.

The vision ahead: turn her house into a working demonstration of what a home can be at this point in the Opus — solar power, sustainable and circular materials, LED murals that shift after dark, art on every wall — built and run in a way that puts real, paid work in the hands of 7 to 12 people. Rebuilding her house isn't a side project. It's the mission underneath everything else JoyXchange makes.

Contact & Support

Questions, support requests, or press inquiries: admin@thejoyxchange.com