Suzanne Jackson: Hers and His, 2018, acrylic, cotton, scenic bogus paper, wood, 86 by 67 inches; at Ortuzar Projects.

Suzanne Jackson’s exhibition at Ortuzar Projects was an autobiography in visual form. Her lush watercolors, like Wormsloe Woods (2004–07), evoke the natural surroundings of Alaska, where she was raised, and Georgia, where she has lived for the past two decades. In her large sculptural hangings—mixed-medium compositions suspended from the ceiling or mounted to the wall—moments of carefully rendered figuration and collaged found objects sit alongside each other, reflecting her early training with the master draftsman Charles White and her involvement in the Black Arts Movement, as both an artist and a gallerist. (From 1968 to 1970 Jackson ran a space called Gallery 32 in Los Angeles. David Hammons, Betye Saar, and Senga Nengudi—then known as Sue Irons—all showed there.) In the late 1970s Jackson applied her skills to a set of outdoor murals in Los Angeles, an experience reflected in a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19), a large-scale horizontal painting that teems with pictorial incident: faces, hands, even a kitten, all floating in whorls of watery pigment. Her stint as a theater designer in the 1990s is conveyed in works like Blues Garden + Track/Back-Sea (2010), which employ crumpled furls of Bogus paper, a material typically used to protect set and costume elements. She acknowledges deep family ties by incorporating motifs that honor her mother’s quilt-making. One particularly effective example, Hers and His (2018), suggests a coverlet, though its sewn sunbursts and fan shapes float free of any larger pattern.

View of Suzanne Jackson’s exhibition “News!” 2020, at Ortuzar Projects.

Given her significant accomplishments, the title of Jackson’s exhibition had a fine irony. The show was called “News!”—note the exclamation point. For this was, amazingly enough, the artist’s first-ever solo presentation in New York. After five decades, she is suddenly getting a lot of attention: her first retrospective, for instance, was held last year at the Telfair Museum in Savannah. This isn’t just another belated “discovery” of an under-sung artist, however: Jackson is currently making the most impressive work of her long career.

Over the past four decades, artist James Turrell has worked to transform a dormant volcano in the Painted Desert of Arizona into his Land art masterwork: Roden Crater, a observatory that’s already been the site of media attention and a short film by Kanye West. Now the project, which has so far fundraised over $40 million, has received another major contribution towards its long-sought goal.

On Thursday night, Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, both of whom are showing works by Turrell at Frieze Los Angeles, cohosted a star-studded party for the artist, attended by the likes of Museum of Contemporary Art director Klaus Biesenbach, noted collector and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and pop star Grimes, who staged a surprise performance. At the event, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Pincus, the founder of the online gaming firm Zynga, announced a $3 million pledge to Turrell’s newest creation, which will turn the volcano into a transcendent installation filled with colorful lights.

“The project itself feels, to me, like modern-day pyramids,” Pincus told the Los Angeles Times. “The ambition and scale and scope of it is something that has the potential to be something that people, many generations from now, will be able to experience and get something amazing from—maybe something beyond what we can imagine today.”

The long-delayed crater is currently closed to the public, as its opening has been contingent on fundraising. In 2019, West donated $10 million after shooting his film Jesus Is King inside the site. That same year, Arizona State University announced a partnership with Turrell and the non-profit Skystone Foundation, which oversees Roden Crater, to help him raise $200 million within two years. In return, the crater will be integrated into the university’s academic programming. Turrell also gives tours of the two-mile-wide crater’s tunnels and viewing chambers at $6,500 per person, to raise funds.

Just hours into the VIP preview day of Frieze Los Angeles at Paramount Studios on Thursday, model Kendall Jenner and WME executive Ari Emanuel had purchased artworks. Jenner picked up a piece by James Turrell at a both shared by Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran. Emanuel, whose company owns a portion of Frieze, bought a large painting by Jordan Casteel at Casey Kaplan gallery’s booth. At 1:30 p.m., Alex Israel, the quintessential Los Angeles artist who features the city in many of his artworks, could be found, standing just inside the entrance to the fair wearing a sweatshirt that said “California” on it, making him an unintentional mascot.

Like many annual events, an art fair’s sophomore edition is when it needs to prove itself. Frieze got lucky. Last year, when it had the novelty factor, there was torrential rain on VIP day. This year, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, temperatures hovered around 70 degrees, and collectors came out in droves.

There were Cindy and Howard Rachofsky from Dallas, the Rubells from Miami, the Horts, the Eisenbergs and Sascha Bauer from New York (and Maja Hoffman, from New York and Switzerland). And there were plenty of locals, including, Beth Rudin de Woody, who has a residence in Los Angeles as well as New York and Palm Beach.

Pace Gallery and Kayne Griffin Corcoran’s presentation at the fair featured works by James Turrell that were bought by the likes of Kendall Jenner.