The artist
Andrea Napierkowski
It's hard to start over. But with each new book comes a new chapter — and it's been fun to write.
This is the story of how color became my compass home — from grayscale to spectrum, from containment to full growth.
More ∞ Joy · Grand Rapids, MI
I was always good at becoming what the room needed. I didn't yet know that the goal was to become what I needed.
The Beginning
Born a mirror
I came into the world as one of two. My twin sister and I were a closed system — a built-in experiment in empathy, in reading the other person’s face from across a room before either of us had words for what we were doing. An arched brow. A softened eye. A suppressed grin. We could run an entire comedy sketch without speaking. I was learning to read bodies, mirror feelings, and track emotional weather before I understood any of it as a skill.
I was homeschooled, which meant I had a different relationship with authority than most kids my age. I learned to think freely. I learned to question systems. I also learned to perform within them when I needed to, which is a specific kind of intelligence that comes with a specific kind of cost. My early education gave me the room to develop ideas fully. It also left some gaps in the social scaffolding that I’m still happily patching.
We grew up in a deeply religious household. The structure was absolute, the community was tight, and there was a language for everything — including who you were and what you were for. That language gave me roots. It also gave me a very particular relationship to identity, which is to say: I spent a long time wearing costumes that belonged to other people’s stories.
THE BUILDER YEARS
Built in Public, Wearing Someone Else's Colors
I started college at fourteen. I built businesses in my twenties. I became a web developer and then a digital strategist and then a creative director — mostly because once I learned how to do something, I wanted to know what it could become. Jump Shipp. CurlyHost. Years of showing up in rooms where I was the youngest, or the only, or the loudest, or the quietest, depending on what the room needed.
As Creative Director at CurlyHost, I helped other people build their digital presence — their websites, their brands, their stories online. I was genuinely good at it. I understood how people wanted to be seen, how to translate a person’s essence into something a stranger could trust in three seconds. I had mirror neurons for it.
I also organized Doc Nights — regular gatherings where I’d bring a community together around a documentary and then take the conversation deeper. These became a kind of ritual practice before I had language for what ritual meant to me: the same people, the same space, the same willingness to feel something together. Community as nervous system regulation. I was building it before I knew that’s what I was doing.
Inside all of this, I wore black. Safe. Contained. Professional. The black was practical — it coordinated, it communicated competence, it didn’t ask anything of the people looking at me. I was surrounded by people constantly. Inside, I felt flat. Not sad exactly. Just… not yet myself. I was very good at mirroring what the world wanted to see. I just hadn’t looked in a mirror that showed me back.
I was constantly around others and inside I felt black — not as a color, but as an absence. Devoid of the joy I was watching other people perform.
THE TURNING POINT
The Unraveling & The Return
Sobriety didn't fix me. It freed me to find out what I actually was.
Six years ago, I got sober. I want to say that plainly, without drama, because there was very little drama in it. There was no lightning bolt. There was a quiet, scared, curious part of me that had been waiting for permission to exist — and getting sober was the permission slip.
Sobriety stripped away what I’d been using to manage a nervous system that, I would later learn, was running at a very specific and very demanding frequency. Shortly after, I was diagnosed with autism. These two things arrived together like a pair of explanations I’d been waiting my whole life to receive. I wasn’t too much. I wasn’t a problem to be managed. I was a particular kind of person with a particular kind of nervous system — and I had spent decades overriding what it was trying to tell me.
I wasn’t falling apart. I was finding out what I was made of on my own.
I recovered my sense of self while playing outdoors in the wind. More ∞ Joy grew from those moments of healing when no one was watching but the sun.
THE PRACTICE
Getting the manual
My nervous system asked for soil. I listened. I started going outside with no agenda. I made my bed every morning. I started a garden. I took long baths. I took naps without guilt. I found yoga, ecstatic dance, and the specific, irreplaceable medicine of moving your body until it remembers how to feel good.
I built an art room — just to be in the presence of the materials. Fabric. Beads. Thread. Color. My hands needed to be in the making. I started embroidering before the day started, when the world was quiet, and the nervous system hadn’t been asked to perform yet. That hour became sacred.
And then came color. The first time I mixed Procion MX pigment and watched it activate on wet fabric — watched it travel where I hadn’t told it to go, land in patterns I hadn’t planned, find beauty in what I would have called a mistake — something in my nervous system recognized it. Here was a sensation I could choose. Here was a conversation with something unpredictable that I could also trust. I stopped trying to control the outcome. I started collaborating with it.
THE PRACTICE LIST
What I Was Learning to Do
baths · naps · soil · embroidery · bonsai · beads · violin · color · fabric · stargazing · walking · making · light · rhythm · texture · ecstatic dance · yoga · stillness
THE DISCOVERY
Color Is a Language — And My Body Already Spoke It
I started noticing what I reached for in the morning before I faced the day. My closet became a mood ring. My body always knew how to shine a light on what was happening inside me — even when I didn’t logically understand the connection yet.
Over six years I’ve learned to use color the way some people use words — as a daily act of self-communication. The color I put on is the color I’m in. It communicates how confident I feel, how much space I want to take up, how ready I am to be seen. Some days I’m fire. Some days I’m moss. Some days I am the sky — cool and steady and wide. The clothes don’t create the feeling. They tell the truth about it.
Not everyone needs the same hue. Just like not everyone needs the same amount of salt. But everyone has a color that tells the truth about them. I started helping people find theirs.
THE STUDIO
What Was Private Became Public
More ∞ Joy began in my garden and my art room, in the private practice of healing when no one was watching. It became public slowly — a session here, a pop-up there, a scarf draped over someone else’s shoulders and the look on their face when the color landed right.
What I was doing in isolation became a connection. Color had healed me and helped me develop a wardrobe that made me feel confident going out and trying something new. I started wanting to give other people that experience — the moment when the right color settles into their body and something shifts. Not a dramatic shift. Just a small, specific settling. A coming home to themselves.
I began offering dash-dye sessions at the House of Ann — my home studio in Grand Rapids. Then color analysis sessions, where I’d pull swatches and put them in someone’s hands until we found the palette that was already theirs. Then Power Portraits — building a full wearable look in a person’s chosen colors and photographing them in motion outdoors. I watched people become activated by the right color. Every single time.
THE COLLECTIONS
Color in Motion
The private practice eventually walked a runway.
The Vibrant Rainbow collection debuted at Michigan Fashion Week — a full-spectrum show where every model wore a color chosen to communicate something true about them. What I saw on that runway wasn’t fashion. It was people trying on versions of themselves they hadn’t been allowed to be yet. Posture changing. Stride changing. The clothes doing what clothes do when they finally fit: making the person inside them more visible, not less.
The Autumn Rainbow followed, at the 494 Art of Now Gallery Fashion Show — deeper tones, richer shades, for people who had earned their complexity. Then Cosmic Bodies, presented at Michigan Fashion Fest’s NYFW showcase — eight planetary looks designed not to look like space, but to feel like it. Saturn’s restraint. Neptune’s depth. Jupiter’s expansiveness. Each look an archetype. Each model inhabiting their planet, not wearing it.
THE PORTRAITS
Being Seen in Your Color
The Power Portrait series is where color meets story. Each portrait begins with a question: what color is your body reaching for right now? Not your brain. Not your wardrobe history. Not what you think looks good on you. We hold swatches until one holds you back. Then we build a full wearable look in that color — layered, intentional, yours. Then we go outside near sunset, to the Grand River or the forests and parks across West Michigan — and I photograph what your body does when it finally feels right.
The Michigan Birds series takes this further: we research the bird together — its coloring, migration pattern, behavior, what it might reflect about the person — and then we build the look. When someone steps into their bird, there’s a moment where you can see them recognize something. Not become something. Recognize something they already were.
The Men in Motion series asked a quieter question: what does masculinity look like when it’s allowed to move? The answer, every time, was more interesting and more human than the container it’s usually offered.
