Meet 2022-2024 RedLine Resident Artist Jasmine Holmes!

Jasmine Holmes is a Southern artist who creates drawings through a variety of media. She received her BFA from the University of West Florida, and her MFA from Colorado State University.

Her works are meant to offer discourse on consumerist society and its appetite for devouring Black culture. She uses depictions of staple foods from her Creole upbringing, hair culture, music and textiles to showcase the eternal connections she keeps to her ancestral home.

Her work celebrates the many colorful aspects of Black American culture while creating conservation on the multifaceted way it's consumed and regurgitated amongst the populace.

Watch the video of Jasmine in her studio at RedLine to learn more about her and her practice!

“I am Jazz Holmes. I'm a mixed media drawing artist, but I tend to do a bunch of different things, like installation and 3D work along with 2D work. And my practice involves a lot of push and pull when it comes to placing marks on a page and then taking things away, putting things back until I create textures that I really like and textures that speak to people who are looking at my pieces. And I love color, so I like to throw color just everywhere in my work. And I want my work to make people happy and to smile when they look at it.

“I grew up drawing, actually. I have been drawing my whole life, so it's kind of like a natural practice to me to just find a piece of paper, feel the texture of the paper, and if I really like it, I just want to throw things at it for the most part.

“My newer series of work is inspired by my Southern upbringing. I am Creole, so I grew up eating a lot of different types of food. And I grew up in the kitchen with my family. That was like my sanctuary. And I still cook to this day. And having visited my family recently, I've decided to start bringing in actual 3D elements into my work.

“Instead of just painting food, I want people to experience food, experience that cultivation of land, experience that importance of ingredients and how that connects myself to my ancestry, like certain ingredients that we brought over that didn't even exist in this country until we were brought here. So things like peppers and okra and corn and rice, certain types of rice, I really want to start drying, which is what I'm working on now, something I grew up doing, this way of preservation of history.

"I moved to Colorado six years ago and I fell in love with it. I came here to get my Master's Degree. And while I was getting my Master's Degree, I just happened to meet Louise, the Executive Director of RedLine. And I didn't know who she was at the time. I just fell in love with this woman, and we became friends. And the more that I started to visit Denver, the more I started to visit RedLine, the more I realized that everyone here is just, they became close friends of mine, they became family of mine.

“And something about Redline is just such a freeing, it's a freeing opportunity. It's an opportunity that allows artists to feel like they're valued. And I am just really connected to Redline and the fact that it makes me feel valued, it makes me feel like I'm actually becoming the artist that I've always wished I could be.”

About the Artist-in-Residency Program at RedLine

As RedLine's foundational program, our Artist Residency remains at the core of all we do as an organization.

We offer 2-year residencies for 15-18 emerging, contemporary artists in Colorado. All Artist Residents and Resource Artists receive fully subsidized studio spaces to provide financial flexibility, giving residents the freedom to explore and experiment without commercial constraints.