Jasmine Little, known for her etched ceramics, dies at 41

Jasmine Little, a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her etched ceramics, has died, her gallery announced. She was 41.

Kirk Nelson, the owner of La Loma Projects who worked with her since 2019, announced Little’s death in a post to Instagram on Friday. He did not provide a cause of death.

“I was awed by her art and prodigy, but what I will miss most of all is our deeply silly, exasperating friendship. Long conversations in her studio about the lonely, inspired life of artmaking. Nonstop texting and teasing and challenge,” Nelson said.

“She called me ‘dork’ and ‘loser’ like it was going out of style. A shy, sly, Birkenstocked figure always giving me shit. She drove me crazy. I loved her.”

Nelson described Little’s art as “epic, showstopping, out of time” and said her work often stopped people in their tracks.

“I still don’t know how this sardonic kid from Joshua Tree sgraffito’d whole mythologies onto stone as if she was beamed in from Pompeii A.D.,” Nelson said.

“She worked in divine, painful frenzies for days and weeks on end. Monuments emerged. Five-hundred-pound sculpture inlaid with obsessively, beautifully detailed linework and whole narratives. Never planned…. impromptu!”

Nelson noted that Little was also a “helluva painter.” She was known for her vibrant and highly saturated still lifes in that medium.

“On visits to her studio, my son cradled her three cats—when they weren’t popping in and out of her gigantic pots. My daughter drew her into family portraits. When we remember to, we angle the X-rated scenes on her ceramics away from guests in our living room,” Nelson said.

Gallerist Nina Johnson, who mounted solo shows of Little’s work in 2022 and 2024, was among those who paid tribute to Little on social media.

“She was a tremendously gifted artist whose vision ranged from painting into ceramics. Her insatiable need to create produced otherworldly objects that exist outside of time and will continue to live,” Johnson said. “Be mindful of the creators in your world, we live in a difficult time and the people who gift us with beauty deserve our kindest selves.”

Little was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1984. She got an associate’s degree from Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree in 2003, followed by a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2007 and a master’s degree from Adam State University in Alamosa, Colorado, in 2015.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including shows in Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Korea and the U.K.

And her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Perez Art Museum, Detroit Museum of Art and the Nevada Museum of Art.

“I will miss her forever,” Nelson said. “My deepest condolences to her family and all who knew her.”