Jasmine Best
Athens, GA
The Georgia based artist uses her personal memories and manipulations of her memories to create dialogues about the black femme identity in the south.
MessageCollection: American Weeds Growing through Docile Garden
Draws parallels the defining of wild and domestic weeds to take on the erasure and control of black femme bodies and identity. To encourage discussion about the psychological and physical fight against misogynoir black femmes are constantly in both outside of and within their own communities.
The history of Black Southern femmes navigating our place in American Society has a lot in common with the narrative of the American weed. Brought over from far away countries to task and multiply. But once thriving past what was expected, the plants were labeled weeds and black femmes were deemed undesirable and segregated from growing in the presence of those flowers found acceptable to be in the garden. Resilience twisted against them and used to justify their dismissal. Living in the intersection of having others desire your physical, mental, and emotional labor but not finding you of value. The control, containment, and killing of them became normal; and was even encouraged. Being defined for what they can or can not provide to others and anything outside of those external constraints being erased, ignored, or deemed a problem.