Suzanne Jackson’s Ethereal Acrylic Hangings Connect Autobiography and Abstraction

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.