Suzanne Jackson (artist)

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Suzanne Jackson
Suzanne Jackson at Wormsloe Historic Site, Savannah, Georgia 2018
Born	(1944-01-30) January 30, 1944 (age 80) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Other names	Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson, Suzanne Jackson Odùsolú[1]
Education	San Francisco State University (BA), Yale University (MFA)

Suzanne Jackson (born 1944)^[2][1] is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, educator, and set designer; with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings (both two- and three-dimensional), prints, and drawings.

Jackson has spent time throughout her career teaching students and influencing future generations of artists and culture creators, as well as building and participating in close-knit art communities with peer artists and thinkers. She worked in Los Angeles during the 1960s to 1980s, founding Gallery 32, and exhibiting additional work at the Ankrum Gallery. During the 1980s she lived in Idyllwild, California teaching and creating art. She also worked at Yale University, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1990s. She worked in the Savannah, Georgia art community, from 1996 to 2009.

Early life and education

Jackson was born in 1944 in

1980s–1990s

In 1981, Jackson was first introduced to Savannah, Georgia, through an invitation to be a visiting artist with

In 1987, Jackson relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale University, pursuing a master's degree under the tutelage of Ming Cho Lee for scenography. She worked as a freelance scenic and costume designer moving throughout the region; until taking a post at St. Mary's College of Maryland as a scenographer and assistant professor from 1994 to 1996. In 1996, Jackson moved full-time to Savannah, Georgia, to teach at Savannah College of Art and Design^[10] as professor of painting, where she taught full-time until 2009.

2000s–present

Jackson officially retired from SCAD in 2009, but Jackson remained as a part-time and adjunct professor until 2013. Additionally, Jackson taught introductory art history courses, including African American Art History at Savannah State University in 2013–2014 school year. Jackson has remained an active member of the Savannah artistic community and continues to create and exhibit her work. Jackson co-hosts a weekly radio show featuring jazz and conversation, called Listen Hear on WHCJ 90.3 Savannah State University Radio, alongside Ike Carter, Jerome Meadows, Tom Van de Ven, Lisa Jackson and Carla Curran, PhD. In 2019 Jackson was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant.^[11]

Artistic practice

Suzanne Jackson has had an extensive career an emphasized the importance of living the lifestyle of an artist, in her words, to be an artist is to solve problems as opposed to create images. She states, “I'm not an artist yet. I'm a painter. And I draw, and I work in theater as an "artist person," in quotes. But to become an artist takes a whole lifetime.”^[3] Throughout her career, Jackson has looked to nature for inspiration, she has consistently related blackness to nature.^[3] Her work has celebrated blackness through the representation of black bodies without an overtly political message.

Visual arts

Jackson has worked in a variety of visual media including works on paper, works on canvas, and Monoprints. Her works on paper include both watercolors and drawings from throughout her career. Jackson has worked mostly with acrylic paint, her earliest paintings on canvas were with acrylic paint layered, the way one would layer oils paints. She stated, “the imagery that everybody has sort of become familiar with, with the really strong white background and the sort of washy layers and layers of paint—that basically is kind of an old masters technique of layering the color for translucency. It's like the layers and layers of color build a depth in the painting. And some of the paintings, as thin as the color looks, there could be a hundred and fifty layers of color on each of my paintings.”^[3] The 1990s marked a shift in her work as she began to experiment with different combinations of media. As her style progressed, Jackson began to forego the canvas in favor of netting as a substrate. She uses Novacolor brand acrylic gels to create 3-dimensional hanging works held together by fabric, papers, found objects, leaves, and or various netting.^[12]

Her visual art work is included in public museum collections including at the Museum of Modern Art,^[13] California African American Museum,^[14] the Indianapolis Museum of Art,^[15] and the Hammer Museum at UCLA.

Theater and costume design

Jackson graduated from Yale in 1990 and traveled the Northeast region (Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia) as well as parts of California (Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area) working as a freelance Scenic and Costume Designer. Her costume designs were included in the exhibition Onstage: A Century of African American Stage Design, at the Library for the Performing Arts,

• BLUES ROOM, Realto Theatre, National Black Arts Festival, Atlanta, Georgia, originating from the Theatre of the First Amendment, George Mason University, Fairfax Virginia, 1997
• THE SNOW QUEEN, origin, The John F. Kennedy Center, Scenic and Costume design for the touring company, 1996–98
• CHILDREN OF THE SUN, The John F. Kennedy Center, Costume design, 1996–98
• Scenographer at St. Mary's College of Maryland, (Tartuffe, Fefu and Her friends, The Physicists, The Bigger Picture, Happy End, Etta Jenks, In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe) 1994-96
• STAMPING, SHOUTING, AND SINGING HOME, Mark Taper Forum,1993
• BOSEMAN AND LENA at the Philadelphia Drama Guild 1990
• PERICLES and DAYLIGHT IN EXILE at Yale Repertory Theatre 1990
• El Teatro Campesino
  , 1989
• all costumes for Barbara Feldman & Dancers, 1988–96
• THE WINTER'S TALE and MACBETH at California Shakespeare Festival
• designs for Gus Solomons, Company Dance, Jennifer Muller/The Works

Dance

Jackson studied ballet and choreography at university, while a student she was a member of the Pacific Ballet Company (1961–66). Following graduation from college, Jackson participated in a State Department musical theatre tour of South America with Music Theatre U.S.A., and upon returning, Jackson was an instructor of dance and art at

Jackson's poetry has been mentored by the Cave Canem Foundation, Lucille Clifton, St Mary's Women's Writing Group, and the International Women's Writing Guild. Jackson's published artist books featuring her poetry and paintings are “Animal,” and “What I Love.” Jackson's poetry and drawings are included in Cave Canem Anthologies; “the ringing ear: Black Poets Lean South,” 2007, I, II, and IV, 1996–99; Avatar 25, 1996; Potomac Review, Winter 1996; In the Valley of the Moon, International Women's Writing Guild, 1994.

Several of her Artist Statements are written in verse:

MY ART DEALS WITH REALITY

VERSUS FANTASY--- ALONENESS

VERSUS LONLINESS… WHAT I

PAINT ATTEMPTS TO EXPRESS THE

CONFLICTS WITHIN THE MIND,

CONFLICTS OF CHOICES--- OF LOVES,

---OF SENSITIVITIES SEARCHING,

ORDERING, “FREEING” ONESELF

TOWARD SOME CONTINUOUS

CYCLE OF REDISCOVERING WHO,

IN FACT, I MIGHT REALLY BE.

--Statement from Suzanne Jackson’s book, What I Love (1970)

Gallery 32

Many associate Jackson's name with Gallery 32, an art gallery she ran in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles from 1968 to 1970, dedicated to fostering a supportive artist community.

• 2014–2016, Adjunct Professor of Foundation Studies, Drawing, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia
• 2013–2014, Adjunct Professor of Fine Arts, Sabbatical Replacement History I & II; African American Art History, Savannah State University, Savannah, Georgia
• 2009–2013, Adjunct Professor of Painting (eLearning), Graduate Studies, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia
• 1996–2009, Professor of Painting, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia
• 1994–1996, Scenographer and Assistant Professor, St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, Maryland
• 1982–1985, Chair of the Fine and Performing Arts Department, the Elliott‑Pope Preparatory School, (formerly the Desert Sun School), Idyllwild, California.
• 1972, Stanford University (summer), Stanford, California
• 1970, dance and crafts instructor, Watts Tower Art Center, Watts, California

Exhibitions

Below is a select list of notable exhibitions by Jackson.

Further reading

• Bustion, Nathanial. The Eternal Genetic Presence and the Creative Transformation. CA: Aton Mattinnii Fine Arts Studio/ Asaraset Institute, 2015.
• Finch, Richard. Marks from the Matrix: Normal Editions Workshop Collaborative Limited Edition Prints 1976-2006. IL:Normal Editions Workshop, Illinois State University, 2007.
• Goode-Bryant, Linda, and Marcy S. Phillips, eds. Contextures. Exh. cat. New York: Just Above Midtown Gallery, 1978.
• Jackson, Suzanne. Animal. Los Angeles: Continuity Transcripts and Features, 1978.
• Jones, Kellie. South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Durham. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017.
• LeFalle-Collins, Lizzetta, and Cecil Fergerson. 19Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated, 1965–1975. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum Foundation, 1989.
• Lewis, Samella S. Art: African American, 161–62. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
• Peter, Carolyn, and Damon Willick. Gallery 32 and Its Circle. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University, 2009.
• Tate, Mae. "The Art of Suzanne Jackson." Black Art Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1982): 3–21.
• Widener, Daniel. Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

References