Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love — the first retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the artist’s career — celebrates Jackson’s groundbreaking artistic vision through more than 80 paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that emphasize her innovative use of color, light, and structure to expand the parameters of painting and illuminate beauty, peace, and love. Organized chronologically, the exhibition spans early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of pigment and imagery from her dreams to recent three-dimensional paintings suspended in midair and often embedded with materials that draw on ancestral and cultural histories. The presentation concludes with a new large-scale installation that reflects on the global environmental crisis and migration.
Suzanne Jackson: What is Love
Suzanne Jackson, El Paradiso, 1981–84. Acrylic wash and gesso on canvas, 55 × 62 in.
© Suzanne Jackson. Photo by Katherine Du Tiel
Suzanne Jackson, Hers and His, 2018.Acrylic wash, acrylic gel medium, cotton pillowcases, quilt pieces, scenic Bogus paper, produce bag netting, wood, and D-rings, 86 × 67 × 4 in.© Suzanne Jackson. Photo by Timothy Doyon
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”