A Testimony from the Artist
My name is Angelique, and I created Life Arts, formerly known as Life Dress, as a place for art that lifts the soul, speaks the truth, and communicates the love of Our Creator. The goal with Life Arts is to create art that speaks louder than words - yet, has the ability to spark big conversations about life, why we're here, and why we should value humanity.
I have spent over a decade working in the pro-life movement and specifically designing artwork to ignite conversations about how we value life. At 15, I won a lawsuit against my high school administration when they denied my right to start a pro-life club. The story blew up, I began speaking on every major news network, and used the courage God was gifting me to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. I've been vocal about the pro-life mission ever since, and went on to form new groups at my community college and university. My message wasn't popular and I faced a slew of backlash. I didn't back down.
While working on my B.A. in Journalism, I found a job at a local art studio as a camp counselor. My boss told me she needed someone to fill in to teach a canvas painting class. I had always considered myself an artist but had a lot of doubt in my abilities and despised painting. But I prayed, I said yes, devoted a lot of time to the medium, and ended up falling in love. I haven't stopped painting since.
It was shortly after that life-changing push into painting that I founded a pro-life organization called Life Dress. I wanted to combine my passions for art and activism. I hand-painted hundreds of thrifted apparel pieces to visualize the humanity of the preborn and encourage dialogue in everyday life. The organization took me across the world leading apologetics workshops and raising funds for pro-life non-profits.
In 2023, I started working full-time training AI. I was hired with a team of 30 people, and within a year, it grew to 700. The work exposed me early on to the reality of the AI we have in our pockets today - notably in the realm of fine art. As my values were compromised daily in the rapidly advancing ability for Large Language Models to "create" "art" in milliseconds, I realized the culture was at a precipice for total loss of human creativity.
I risked it and quit. During my exit interview, my supervisor told me I had the highest performance of the entire team and asked why on earth I would quit instead of accepting a promotion. It wasn't a difficult decision for me though, as I knew God wanted me somewhere else.
A few weeks later, He led me to a position teaching art at a Christian school. I stopped helping LLMs generate lifeless images and now get to teach children how to love art and the beauty of the process.
My mission as an artist has always been to visualize the love of Our Creator. My inspiration comes from the beauty of the world around me, from the preciousness of unique, unrepeatable human life, and from the emotions that make it possible to cultivate peace in a life that is easily soiled with dysfunction.
A lot of the messaging surrounding the pro-life movement involves restoration of the family. I was raised in a very dysfunctional environment and as I entered my adulthood, God led me out of the abusive patterns and the pain. In the complicated estrangement and absence from my family, I have developed an intense sense of grief - but also a forgiveness, empathy, and love that I didn't know was possible.
In 2025, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms I experienced dated back to my early childhood - I just didn't understand what it was and how heavily I was manipulated. I had a history of suicidal ideation and it became normal for me to contemplate death. While advocating for the lives of preborn people, I found myself at a hypocritical crossroad - how could I claim every life matters when I wasn't so sure mine did?
Once I escaped my situation physically, I began to unravel the psychological damage and found a path to healing. Recognizing that grief will always be with me, but so will Christ, helped me to pull myself above water. My faith strengthens with each new suffering and inspires me to keep going with a heart of forgiveness and compassion. It allowed me to see human value from not just an objective perspective, but from a personal one. Our lives as human beings are not valuable simply because we believe it, we are valuable because a God of love created us in His image and our mortality isn't in our hands.
Along this bumpy ride of life, I would unequivocally attribute my greatest understanding of authentic love in this physical world to the love of my life, Alejandro. We met in college and have been best friends since our first date. The joy of being able to build a healthy family with him has given me the hope I needed to overcome a lifetime of dysfunctional family experiences. He has opened my eyes to how possible it is to choose love and build something beautiful.
As I traveled through these experiences, I have shifted my focus and the impact I want my pro-life activism to have. Relationships, family, and mental health play such massive roles in how we view ourselves and the people around us. It influences every choice, every decision, every thought about worth, value, and mortality.
When a mother facing unplanned pregnancy considers the options she has for the fate of her preborn baby, what questions will she be asking? Will she understand the value of her child, beyond all the trials and fears? Will she know the baby's value, or will she project the state of her own self-worth onto them and see "termination" as an erasure of this supposed defect? Abortion as a socially acceptable choice speaks volumes about how human beings value our own species. Being willing to violently end the most vulnerable and tiny of human beings speaks to how flippant we can be of our own value.
We were not created to destroy. We were created for joy.
There is joy in life, and it becomes insurmountably larger as suffering increases, and that is the message I want to share with Life Arts. Thinking in terms of design composition, positive space is the focal point, the subject, the thing you look at first. Negative space surrounds it. May the positive space in your life be Love personified: Jesus Christ.
Thank you for being here.