Jazzmin Imani
“A Gathering of Girls and Spirits,” 50" x 40" , Charcoal and acrylic paint on canvas
Jazzmin Imani uses personal archives to interrogate collective memories and histories that exist across generations, beyond oceans and landmasses, and within resistance movements. Her lived experience and research investigate what it means to be African-American and Puerto Rican in a way that transcends a single historical moment and engages with how history feels—in its activation through remembrance—rather than the Western notion of history as frozen. This is not a stagnant process; the purpose of these reflections is to engage with speculative imaginings of decolonized futures for these diasporas. The work embodies what it feels like to grapple with selfhood in relation to community and how to imagine a place or time that one is connected to without directly experiencing it, such as a specific land or revolution. Her work takes a variety of forms, such as insulation foam sculptures, canvases with a variety of media, and large scale painted quilts. Often, cultural markers like beauty supply stores, quenepa bunches, and vejigante masks clue the viewer into the place and feeling of a particular moment. The formal choice in her works to stretch fabric between canvases or embroider into a gessoed surface echoes the conceptual bridge—or often, gap—between what we believe to be true and what is left to be discovered; between one experience of American history and another; or between the viewer and the artist.
Jazzmin Imani
Jazzmin Imani is a figurative artist working with paint, charcoal, and fiber materials. She is currently pursuing her MFA in painting at Tyler School of Art and received an AB in Visual Arts with honors from Brown University in 2023. She has received several national awards for her paintings including from Scholastics, the YoungArts Foundation, and the AXA Art Prize. She has been featured in group and solo shows across the East Coast including in DC, Brooklyn, and Providence. In 2019, she wrote, illustrated, and self-published the children’s book When Art is Loved, a story about the importance of representation in museums. In her work, you can often find motifs relating to her Afro-Rican identity, scenes from her memory as a young girl, and depictions of significant events in African-American and Puerto Rican history and present. For more information, please visit jazzminimani.com