Jasmine Best

Written By Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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Jasmine Best is a true Southern Artist, gathering narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. The North Carolina based artist uses her personal memories and manipulations of her memories 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.

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Toe Walker | Jasmine Best
Toe Walker | Jasmine Best

Jasmine Best (Greensboro, NC) | October 2021

Toe Walker is an exercise in body awareness and personal appreciation. It encourages audiences to consider how they take up space in the world and how their body automatically navigates. The artist naturally walks on the balls of her feet. A trait that is hereditary but was also encouraged in girl children as benign a femme trait. Walking on your toes one is used to moving through the world quietly and minimally. This was interrupted by the very old and loud floors of Elsewhere. Jasmine decided to fight their instinct to walk on the quietest parts of the floor and actively seek out where the floor makes the most noise.

Toe Walker is made up of bright, balls of feet only, painted footprints that directly correlate to how loud the floor is where the most footprints reside. Toe Walker invites audiences to play with how much space they want to take up with their movement and how much attention they allow themselves to draw to their movement in Elsewhere.

Curation Doll in Nana's Chair | Jasmine Best
Curation Doll in Nana's Chair | Jasmine Best

Jasmine Best (Greensboro, NC) | October 2021

Curation Doll draws power to protect so that we do not have to be strong. The doll figure has skin made of images of flowers arranged from Elsewhere’s own fabric collection. The era of these fabrics informs the aesthetic and associations of the florals. The actual flowers collected from the collection drape the doll and, it’s resting chair, and the frames on the wall creating a protective covering. The artist’s own family would make fabric dolls and place them on chairs both as showcases of skills previously only appreciated in a domestic context but what felt to be as protectors of a domestic space. The Doll figure sits relaxed and reserved in front of an abstracted family photo wall. Pulling more power from the idea of personal black curation in reference to an essay by Bell Hooks about how home photo walls were some of the only places Black people were able to control their own image in a gallery like space.

Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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