Jasmine Best

Lives and works in Boone, NC

Artist statement

Best finds connections between storytelling, folklore, and modern black culture by examining the consequences of the constant absorption but failed assimilation of Black culture into mainstream Western culture both past and present. Best combines personal experiences and signifying practices through storytelling of the complexities of how Black people have wrestled with how blackness becomes Americana. Best is interested in how Black identity's insider/outsider characteristics manifest in archival materials, oral traditions, everyday life, and online spaces. Their research-based practice investigates complicated social capital dynamics entangled with narratives where race and gender intersect. As one descended from those who chose to stay in the Southern United States, Best reinterprets folk histories through personal corporeal archeology of the Southern African American storytelling/audience canon. Best deep reads the gendered implications of archived narratives but also the gendered influence of the storyteller, the audience, and the archivist of these folk stories and histories to bring cultural subtext to the forefront. Best’s work situates itself in musical and literary improvisational theory related to blues ideology and Black vernacular culture. These improvisational applications are focused on Black subjectivity’s relationship to nonconformity and individual future-facing liberatory practices. Best’s use of fibers recontextualizes the women who came before her and...

Artwork