What may be most striking about Jasmine Ross’ “Beauty Plus,” running through May 31 in the salon of the Museum of the African Diaspora, is missing from the photo installation.
The Oakland-based Ross, a member of the MoAD’s Emerging Artist program, captured the eponymous beauty supply store’s final days in its New Haven, Connecticut location of 30 years. The images display many tools and supplies that have shaped Black beauty standards for years, from hair relaxer to wig glue. Missing are the many Black women who visited over the years.
Yes, a few appear. Most are in the family photos belonging to the owner Melvanyia “Queen Mel” Hylton. Ross’s photo “Yellow and Edge Worn” captures the wall behind the counter where images of Hylton’s loved ones were taped above bottles of hair relaxer and wig glue.
“The First Family” features the Obamas smiling from an autographed image personalized by Michelle Obama. But it’s the photo “Mel and Her Ladies” that best illustrates the paradox of the shop’s existence. It shows Hylton flanked by two mannequin busts, her aged African features and naturally-graying hair contrasting with the dark-painted European dolls with synthetic wigs.
From 1995 to 2025, Hylton ran a self-made Black business that sold products imploring its customers to conform to white standards of beauty.
That contrast certainly isn’t lost on Ross. Yet, she fills her installation with text emphasizing the empowerment that came with New Haven’s Black women having their own congregation point. American history is awash with stories of Black Americans finding their own meeting places after being segregated from those used by whites.
Along with churches, Black-owned barbershops and beauty salons were where personal styling and political activism seamlessly intersected. When Hylton retired in 2025, Beauty Plus’ final day of operation saw longtime customers reminisce on the place they went to shop, socialize, and mourn.
Ross’ installation would have benefitted from curation that acknowledged the store as a New Haven social center. In addition to the photos, MoAD visitors will also see “Memorex Portable CD Boombox, Model No. MP3225.”
As the title suggests, the piece is the namesake music box, which sat on Hylton’s counter for more than 20 years, its missing antenna tip replaced by a wad of tin foil. Tuned to 102 Jamz, it says a lot about the relaxed atmosphere Hylton created as her customers picked out hot combs.
Yet, the majority of Ross’s photos depict the store devoid of life. The “What’s Left” photos capture clothing racks with empty hangers. “Ceiling Can’t Hold Us” shows the water-stained panels next to the fluorescent lights and hair extensions.
The “Lady” series that makes up the majority of the installation, features several of the aforementioned dark-painted mannequins (much of the paint having chipped and flaked due to age), with four on display in the MoAD Salon. Most of the images are accompanied by comments from Hylton explaining how she attempted to make the mannequins appeal to her standards of beauty rather than the other way around.
“Lady #5” features a model styled by Beauty Plus employee Lisa Harrell, who would frequently add lipstick and other personal touches to new models that arrived. These help, but there are too few glimpses as to what this business was before it shuttered.
The MoAD Salon housing Ross’s installation sits directly across from the massive “UNBOUND” exhibit. The latter, which combines African folklore and Afrofuturism, merges the past, present, and future through images organically connecting the three points in time.
Granted, the contributors to “UNBOUND” are more seasoned than Ross, but perhaps the issues with “Beauty” are less a matter of experience and more one of curation. Ross spent three months photographing the closure of Beauty Plus, but the myopic scope of her collection suggests a session that took place in a single afternoon.
She clearly has compositional skill behind the lens, but surely, there was more to her documentation than just quick shots of emptying walls.
All of Ross’ skills as a photographer are on display in the photo “Lights Out,” in which silhouettes of the “Ladies” can be made out from a dark corner of Beauty Plus as it closes for the last time. It’s a haunting sight familiar to anyone who’s walked past a beloved former storefront.
Accompanying the photo is a quote from Hylton: “Beauty Plus was Beauty Plus and a whole lot more. That was our slogan: ‘Beauty Plus and a whole lot more’.”
The MoAD collection captures some of the beauty, but this collection from the up-and-coming photographer could have given a bit more.
MoAD’s “Beauty Plus” runs through May 31 at the Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St.