Her career also had its complexities. Jasmine came to UCLA as a figurative painter focusing on self-portraits in the vein of YBA artists like Jenny Saville, but she gravitated toward performance and relational aesthetics with her classmate Jamie Chan, who formed one half of the collective Little Chan. In recent years, she expanded her practice into monumentally scaled stoneware vessels carved with references to medieval manuscripts, Renaissance painting, Safavid carpets, Grecian pottery, Japanese woodblock prints, Roman orgies, and her own Californicated landscapes and myths. She was an archaeologist of antiquity who strip-mined classical forms to remake them in her own inimitable style.
“It was contemporary California language meets Joshua Tree meets antiquity, and then she’d put it all together into some stoneware that would probably last 30,000 years,” says Kirk Nelson, owner of La Loma Gallery, which represented Little during the last years of her life. “Her vessels are gonna wash up when all the buildings have burned down and you'll see a Jasmine Little sticking out of the sand somewhere.”
These clay works were hewn from a proprietary clay mixture—dubbed Jasmine Red—embedded with gravel, porcelain, rocks and even bricks salvaged from an Arts and Crafts-era house in Pasadena. During this same period, she also produced lush, tumescent still-life paintings invoking the Dutch Masters with astonishing speed in a studio practice that would run into the morning hours for days, sometimes weeks, on end.
“When she was working she would sleep till noon and then she'd paint all the rest of the day and all night, and she just wouldn't quit for 18 hours and she'd do that for months,” says her father, Dusty Little. “She was very dedicated. You can't imagine how much time she put into it, actually.”
“Her work seemed really unique and very specific to her. Not like it was jumping into different artist gene pools, you know? It was more like, okay, this is a clear voice. And that's something you look for, that person who is making their own thing that's very identifiable,” adds Nelson. “Nick Aguayo introduced us in 2018 and after I met her I thought, this is a voice that I want to follow.”
“Everyone knew she was a magical artist. Jonas Wood collected her art. I collected her art. Everyone knew that she was spiritually connected to that creative soup that we all know is true. There’s a truth that real artists connect to and it’s aesthetically coherent,” adds collector and gallerist Stefan Simchowitz, who bought Little’s work in bulk over the past decade. “We can't explain what it is, just like you can't explain why a joke is funny or why a Zen saying has meaning. It just does.”
Born in 1984 in Portsmouth, Virginia, into a Naval family, Jasmine spent her grade school years as a prototypical Naval brat hopping between Norfolk, Chicago, San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. Her parents divorced when she was in junior high, and she went to live with her mother in the high desert military town of Twentynine Palms. While she struggled academically in high school, she attended Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree before completing her undergraduate studies at UCLA. She later became part of the burgeoning Chinatown scene, exhibiting at spaces like Black Dragon Society, which was co-founded by Herman.
“Jasmine probably had shows at every space in Chinatown over those ten years. She was just very present,” says Josh Callaghan, who was an MFA student at UCLA while Little was there.
“She was a force,” remembers Herman. “My class was full and she came and said, ‘I want to be in your class.’ And then I said, ‘I don't know. I really have no room, but can you show me some work?’ And she showed me these paintings of herself that were bigger than life, you know, like a real frontal with a bra on. She was unbelievable and very pure and it's tragic for me because I think she got messed up from the art world more than from her alcoholism. It ate her up. You know how the art world is.”
On the heels of graduating from UCLA and after a hard run with partying in Chinatown, Jasmine moved in with her father in Alamosa, Colorado, and spent the next decade exploring the wilds of the San Luis Valley, where she focused on sobriety, got married, and earned her MFA at Adams State University, which still has a massive two-panel landscape depicting an almost alien vantage of the Rockies hanging in its halls. It was during this sojourn that she got into ceramics and even became a licensed real estate appraiser.
“She was brilliant. She picked it up and passed the test the first time, got her license, and if you look up the national registry you'll find her in there until it expires,” says Dusty Little. “She used that same skillset in appraising and looking at art and deciding what was good and what wasn't.”
This skillset surely bled into her practice at times, which borrowed heavily from the high points of art history.
“I think a lot of the different periods of her work could be seen as Jasmine just loving different types of art and doing homage and falling in love with different art forms, like the way she did with ceramics,” says Jamie Chan. “She met someone who was really encouraging and ran a ceramics lab and ceramics is a community-based practice, you know, and painting is extremely isolated. So I think she got some relief from the pressure of trying to turn out amazing paintings, which can be exhausting.”
Jasmine returned to Los Angeles in 2021 and quickly reengaged with the broader art community just as her career accelerated. Her ceramics and paintings appeared in exhibitions across Los Angeles at Night Gallery, Five Car Garage, and Wilding Cran Gallery in a show I curated a couple summers ago, where she exhibited a fulminating eight-foot-tall still life incredibly titled A Child’s Garden of Taxonomy. (She collaborated with her brother, Justin, to title all her paintings.) She showed in New York at Deitch and Johannes Vogt, in Miami at Nina Johnson, and curated a big group show at Tif Sigfrids in Athens, Georgia. Her work was also shown internationally in Paris, Shanghai, Brussels, and Salzburg. During this period, her ceramics entered the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Nevada Museum of Art. For a time, Jasmine Little was on fire.
“I think she just loved making work. She got so excited about it, and that excitement was contagious. We’d feed off it together,” says Nelson. “The final works she was making were these eight-foot-tall vessels. She’d stay in the studio until two in the morning for weeks on end. That drive was innate. She had this inner fire to make work around the clock, and that’s why she was so prolific. It was thrilling to be around.”
