Mothers and Daughters and Mothers Again – Paulette DeJarnette

Mothers and Daughters and Mothers Again
Paulette DeJarnette

2025 Merit Award Recipient

   Paulette DeJarnette is an art undergraduate student working primarily as a graphic designer at Vanderbilt University. Throughout her time at Vanderbilt, she has created work chiefly pertaining to the intersection of blackness and femininity. Through her work, she hopes that the viewer will reflect upon the context in which they view and interact with black women and young girls. Throughout her fourth year, she has worked as a studio assistant to the artist Magdalena Campos-Pons, where she has contributed to Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity (2024) and another work set to be exhibited in May of 2025. In the Buchanan Fellowship: Experiencing Ehon Reading and Making Japanese Illustrated Books, she created a Japanese children’s book and fostered a love of text, image, and narrative storytelling, a love that shows up most in her video, print, and comic work. Serving as the president of Vanderbilt’s Entertainment Underground, she also crafts social and themed experiences, having worked on the experience and environmental design of multiple escape rooms, both virtual and in real-life, and a murder mystery dinner. She uses these experiences as chances to apply artistic and performance skills to real-life environments.

About the work:

DeJarnette’s work, Mothers and Daughters and Mothers Again, comments on the legacies intersecting with black motherhood and girlhood. DeJarnette explores the relationship between black mother and daughter and braided bonds that extend beyond a lifetime.

Braids woven of multi-colored yarn, twine with red rope, braiding hair, and thread are embedded with jewelry, beads, and barrettes. Braids and the braiding process are a stand-in for generational continuity and generational intimacy. The braid and braiding ornaments are representative of the diversity of life stages, extending the sentiment of generational closeness to the entirety of an inheritor’s life. The family photo wall display evokes the emphasis of familial relationships – where the individual mounds of braids exist within the borders of the frames with braids extending to others weaving the persistence of legacy.

The installation: