How We Get Over: The Rest of Us

Hey! My name is Jasmine Williams, I'm an artist and curator and 1 half of an artist duo. My creative partner, Sarah Jene, a multidisciplinary artist, and I are looking for funding to actualize one of our dream exhibitions, How We Get Over: A Southern Grief Museum.

Sarah and I both, like many of us experienced a lot of loss in the era of Covid. We both were wrestling with the loss of family members, but realized the loss we were feeling felt bigger than just losing people. To give context it was around 2020, while we were seeing a lot of public unrest, inflation, water crisis, so many things that began to reshape our minds around loss and how we fit, with our personal losses and our larger societal ones.

We began to think about the things that have carried us over, from generation to generation. The prayer closets, the libations, the repasts, dancing, singing, being in community and the many things that have aided in keeping us.

How We Get Over is an interactive exhibition that holds space for Black Southerners to honor and reckon with our grief. Through the use of film, sound, sculpture, and other forms of creative media from contemporary Black Southern artists, the exhibition highlights traditional and modern Southern grieving rituals. How We Get Over pays homage to the ways Black, Southern people have historically 'gotten over'. Our goal is to contextualize the perpetual grief Black folks experience on a personal and societal level, while highlighting the technologies of joy and restoration we've created in our existence.

Since birthing this idea, Sarah and I have been granted amazing opportunities to share our work in smaller installations. 'We Grow On' , presented by the Mississippi Museum of Art as part of the 2023 CAPE Artist-in-Residence is an outdoor installation that reminds us we don’t get rid of grief; we grow through it. With a moss couch and an original stained glass piece by Adrienne Domnick, we invited audiences into the Mississippi Museum of Art’s garden to settle into the difficult and variegated experiences of grief and to find new experiences of softness, healing, and resilience.

We're now in preparation for our next installation in the How We Get Over series, The Rest of Us, an outdoor art installation that empowers us to imagine a world where rest is interwoven into our freedom dreams. We welcome artists to engage in a world where rest is now. We’re asking, what does rest look like for you?

This installation will include a moss bed and a stained glass piece to create an oasis for rest. Accompanied by a nightstand altar, this engagement space asks us to consider the things we have to release or be freed from to engage in radical rest. A place for participants to write burdens they wish to lay down.

We need help getting this installation to Miami, FL for Art Basel, next week! Funding has been a challenge and we're hoping our communities can come together to help make this happen. Any amount helps! We're currently fronting all of our initial costs, but we are committed to sharing our art and creating space for grief and joy. Thank you for being a part of our journey, you even taking the time to read about us means a lot.

Thank you for your help!