Suzanne Jackson, an influential painter whose work was a star of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, will get a touring retrospective that kicks off this fall.
The present, titled “Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,” will first open on September 27 on the San Francisco Museum of Trendy Artwork, which co-organized the present with the Walker Artwork Middle in Minneapolis. It should then journey in March 2026 to the Walker earlier than ending out its run on the Museum of High-quality Arts Boston.
Throughout the 80-plus works featured shall be early figurative work, abstractions from her mid-career interval, and newer works, a few of that are adorned with refuse and allowed to hold free from the wall. The SFMOMA model of the present can even be a newly commissioned set up, ¿What Feeds Us?, that can embody moss, bark, scraps of African materials, Indian sari curtains, and extra.
Jenny Gheith, the interim curator and head of SFMOMA’s work and sculptures division, will set up the present. In an electronic mail, she informed ARTnews that the exhibition was partially an homage to Jackson’s time spent in San Francisco, the place she grew up and attended school.
“Each side of ‘Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love’ was guided by conversations with Jackson and formed by the impulse to mirror and honor the spirit and ethos that suffuse her life and work,” Gheith mentioned. “It’s an honor to open Jackson’s retrospective in San Francisco, a metropolis that has knowledgeable her creativity, and debut Jackson’s new fee ¿What Feeds Us?, a large-scale sculptural set up that displays on the worldwide environmental disaster.”
Jackson, 81, first gained discover in the course of the Nineteen Sixties in Los Angeles, the place she ran Gallery 32. There, she confirmed artwork by David Hammons, Betye Saar, and others whereas she additionally undertook her creative observe. “I wished to color magnificence, although that was a grimy phrase,” she informed Artwork in America in 2023. She started engaged on with acrylic when it wasn’t so broadly utilized in artwork, and has continued to color in that medium within the many years since.
She has been based mostly in Savannah, Georgia, since 1996, the 12 months she took Savannah School of Artwork and Design, and has continued exploring an curiosity within the surroundings since then. A part of that exploration has led her to reuse dried acrylic chips for a method she has termed “acrylic in acrylic.”
There was a surge in curiosity in Jackson’s artwork, even previous to final 12 months’s Whitney Biennial. Her artwork figured in acclaimed exhibitions equivalent to “Now Dig This! Artwork and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” and “Soul of a Nation: Artwork within the Age of Black Energy,” which debuted at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum in 2011 and London’s Tate Trendy in 2017, respectively.
