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Jasmine Best
Jasmine Best is a Southern artist who gathers narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. Best uses her personal memories and manipulations of those recollections to create dialogues about the black female identity in the south and in predominately white spaces. 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.
Best's broom Power Object series is a material study of Southern visual culture, engaging Southern conjure beliefs. Each object uses the traditional tension-based means of broom-making to create objects that are not designed for sweeping but purely to protect, harm, heal, and yield power in various ways. While digging through the archives at the University of Georgia, Best found lists of conjure and hoodoo beliefs that had been gathered by WPA and other folk historians and anthropologist groups. The theme of the broom used to either protect or harm was reoccurring. Best says her own family had many broom superstitions and she was excited to find the logic behind some of them. She is interested in the history of everyday people finding ways to give themselves power with everyday objects. Medium specificity materializes the emotions tied to memories, and speaks to the material culture of the Southern U.S. Best utilizes these materials as a means of turning the everyday into the supernatural and as a form of Black resistance.
Best's art also involves variations on figures in fabric. Her family would make dolls and place them on chairs and along walls both as showcases of skill and protectors of domestic space. Her work references essayist bell hooks in suggesting that home photo walls were some of the only places black people could control their own image in a gallery-like space.
Best holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina, and earns her MFA from the University of Georgia this year. She has shown at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, SECCA, and the African American Museum in Dallas. Best’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Vox Populi, Paper Machine, and Commonthreads Press; click here to read the Burnaway article about her show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville.