Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love
Event Details
What Is Love traces painter Suzanne Jackson’s (US, b. 1944) lifelong devotion to beauty as a political force. As the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist’s career, the exhibition spans six decades of work and highlights her evolving engagement with poetry, dance, and theater.
At the center of Jackson’s practice is a dedication to both the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. Her joyful experimentations with color, light, and materiality refuse stereotypical notions of Blackness, insisting instead on complexity and tenderness. In her early figurative works, loose washes of acrylic paint reveal a reverence for memory and ancestral lineage. In later works, representational forms give way to abstraction. Textured layers of paper evoke ancient topographies, while luminous acrylic forms hang like dreams suspended midair. Guided by the notion that beauty is an act of care and a means of survival, Jackson’s work invites us to consider the very nature of love.
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition is curated by Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator, Visual Art, Walker Art Center. Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, Curatorial Assistant, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Laurel Rand‐Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.
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Suzanne Jackson: What is Love is co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Major support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The Walker Art Center’s presentation is made possible with lead support from the John Gabbert and the Room & Board Foundation Exhibition Fund. Major support is provided by the Pohlad Family, and John Taft and Laura Delaney Taft. Additional support is provided by Carlo Bronzini Vender, Deborah and John Christakos, and Susan and Rob White.