Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis, MO) works in Savannah, Georgia, where she has lived since 1996. Her recent works are highly abstracted “anti-canvases,” with flexible two-dimensional surfaces realized into three-dimensional form, contrasting with her early figurative paintings. She was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition and monograph, Five Decades, organized by the Jepson Center for the Arts, Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions at Ortuzar Projects, New York; O-Town House, Los Angeles; Danville Museum of Fine Arts, Danville, Virginia;, and Fashion Moda, New York. Her work has featured in institutional surveys and historic exhibitions including Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); West by Midwest, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018–19); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018–19); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011–13); Gallery 32 & Its Circle, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2009); Synthesis, Just Above Midtown Gallery, New York (1974); Directions in Afro American Art, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (1974); and Black Mirror, Womanspace Gallery, Los Angeles (1973). From 1969–1970 she ran the influential Gallery 32 from her studio in Los Angeles, which in 1970 presented the first group exhibition of Black women artists in L.A. and, likely, the U.S. She is a recipient of the NYFA Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2020) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The California African American Museum; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields; The Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Image: “Rag-to-Wobble”, 2020, Acrylic, cotton paint cloth, vintage dress hangers, 86 x 63 with 14-inch variable bulge (218.4 x 160 with 35.6 cm)
Photo by David Kaminsky. Courtesy of the artist and Ortuzar Projects New York City