Jasmine Best

Jasmine Best is a true Southern Artist, gathering narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. The Georgia based artist uses her personal memories and
manipulations of her memories to create dialogues about the black female identity in the south and in predominantly white spaces.

She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Best recently joined the 2023-2024 Tila Studios Garden Fellowship cohort. She works with tangible and traditional mediums combined with digital means of art making. Her work often depicts maternal figures, each depicting the diversity and qualities that make up the black southern women in her life through several generations.

Research Detail

The Folk story tradition of the Black South has been distanced, exploited, and metamorphosed. I am finding connections to classic Black folklore and modern Black culture. I’m tying those connections to how Black culture is documented, treated, and absorbed into the larger American culture now. By investigating different folk collections styles I’m investigating more about the complexities of how Black people have wrestled with how blackness fits into Americana. I’m making a case for how to be critical of narratives around misogynoir, social capital, and media.

I’m questioning folk histories from a modern Black Feminist perspective to participate in the larger storytelling/audience cannon. I’m inquiring of the gendered implications of the stories themselves but also of the gendered influence of the story teller, the audience, and the archivist of these folk stories and histories.

My use of fibers recontextualizes the women before me who used such materials to curate in their only places they had full control; their homes. Medium specificity is the most concise way for me to materialize the emotions tied to memories. Specific fabrics bring its own inherent narrative. My research into folk histories recently has led me to a connection with material specificity in southern superstition and conjure items. I’m exploring these materials as means of turning the everyday into the supernatural and as forms of Black resistance.

As one who descended from those who chose to stay in the South I am also interested in isolating the “southern Americanness” of Folk stories, music and storytelling to better identify the Southern with-a-capital “S” aspects of my own work. There is a direct and clear line from southern oral storytelling and literature and music but the legacy of this tradition for visual art is not as well defined. What truly categorizes a “Southern” artist?