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Image Credit: Joshua Slowe, March 2025 at the James E. Hooper House in Baltimore, MD.
Bio
Jasmine Gabrielle Washington (b. 1996, Baltimore, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and researcher living and working between Baltimore and Virginia.
Her practice is composed of case studies drawn from lived and inherited field sites, examining how visibility, care, survival, and memory circulate across Black life. Working across photography, film, sound, writing, and exhibition-making, Washington creates projects that consider the conditions under which people are recognized, misread, remembered, and carried forward.
Shaped by personal and intergenerational experience, her work moves through Black single motherhood, family archives, land, grief, inheritance, and the politics of perception. Ongoing bodies of work include The Inheritance of Survival: What Survival Asks of the Children of Black Single Mothers, and Remembering Forward, a long-term project unfolding across her family’s land in Stony Creek, Virginia.
Washington approaches exhibitions as living architectures that gather, hold, and remember. Through image and language, she builds environments that slow perception and make space for complexity, relation, and forms of knowledge that exceed immediate visibility. Her work often engages the instability between image and interpretation, asking what remains present even when it cannot be fully seen, named, or measured.
She is the founder of Use Your Voice (UYV), a curatorial and philanthropic cultural infrastructure centering humankind across difference. Through exhibitions, writing, public programming, and research, UYV supports forms of cultural production grounded in care, interiority, and relational responsibility.
A devoted writer, Washington approaches language as both method and sanctuary. Her texts operate through reflection and excavation, attending to the emotional, social, and historical conditions that shape lived experience.
Washington is currently pursuing her MFA in Photography + Media & Society at Maryland Institute College of Art as a Leslie King-Hammond and France-Merrick Fellow, studying under Bill Gaskins. She is a recipient of the 2026 Fred Lazarus Award for Social Change and a 2026 Darryl Chappell Foundation Mentee under the mentorship of John Simmons. She also serves as the Guest Gallery Curator at Gormley Gallery of Notre Dame of Maryland University, where she has been reappointed through 2027.
Her ongoing inquiry examines the paradox of hypervisibility and erasure, a condition she defines as Invisibly Neon™, where presence is undeniable yet persistently misrecognized. Through artistic, curatorial, and institutional practice, Washington remains committed to building structures that allow complexity to remain intact.
Artist Statement
My work and my experiences are inalienably mine.
I make work, I write, I research, and I’m not in a rush.
I operate as a cogitator.
My practice is composed of case studies drawn from lived and inherited field sites. Through photography, film, installation, writing, sound, and curatorial practice, I examine the conditions under which visibility is produced, withheld, circulated, and misread.
Much of my work moves through Black family life, survival, memory, inheritance, and the unstable relationship between image and interpretation. I am interested in what exceeds immediate recognition: what remains present even when it cannot be fully seen, translated, or received.
We are conditioned to try to survive.
Not to survive, but to try to.
Conditioned to try to survive systems that were never created with Black people in mind.
As a Black, Lesbian, and neurodivergent woman born and living in the United States, I understand visibility as unevenly distributed and autonomy as something many of us are taught is conditional. My work resists that condition.
I am not interested in making myself more legible for consumption.
I am interested in altering the conditions that make translation feel necessary in the first place.
I create situations that slow perception and interrupt fluency, making room for complexity, contradiction, and forms of knowledge carried through gesture, tone, silence, memory, and relation. My interest in sociolinguistics grows from here: I study how authority is coded through language, restraint, embodiment, and performance, and how people learn to negotiate systems that misrecognize them before they are ever fully encountered.
My practice gives me the chance to experience my own life outside of imposed limitation. To operate within an autonomy I was taught to believe I did not have, but do. I always have.
I do not want to be more visible.
I want to be met where I am and as I have always been.
I am: Invisibly Neon™.
I am: A Black Girl Growing Orchids.
I am: just a Black girl from Baltimore,but I AM A BLACK GIRL FROM BALTIMORE™.
CV/Professional Experience
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