Downtown Arts: Jasmine Best

About the Artist

Jasmine Best is a southern artist gathering narratives from her Carolinian family and childhood. Best 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. She works with tangible and traditional mediums combined with digital means of art making. Her work often depicts maternal figures, a reflection of the diversity and qualities that make up the black southern women in her life through several generations.

About the Artwork

"Mouthpiece" is a direct response to the commodification of activism that exponentially increased during the pandemic. Corporations, foundations, and businesses were scrambling to utilize black faces and voices for monetary gain. Black identities are constantly treated as disposable capital in hopes of gaining at the expense of black bodies. While these front-facing measures were being done there were no actual changes happening to these institutions' structures, workforce, hierarchies, or practices that would reflect real systemic racial equity. "Mouthpiece" displays the artist's frustration and how powerless the artist felt watching this happen over and over again.