Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in September 2025
For decades, my figurative forms and challenged shapes have pushed paint beyond the expected. With intentional reflective layers and floating luminous pigment, my work pursues alternative ways of seeing and interpreting spatial relationships of historical events, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and all global people, existing as “environmental abstractions” of our world. – Suzanne Jackson, 2025
The SFMOMA’s What Is Love is the first major museum retrospective of Suzanne Jackson’s creative life spanning six decades. Using acrylic paint like watercolor, her ethereal washes of pigment depict figures intertwined with nature. Included in the review will be recent three-dimensional paintings that suspend acrylic paint midair. A new large-scale commission by the artist will premiere during this retrospective, inspired by her longstanding observations of the natural world.
A San Francisco Bohemian Ethos
Jackson moved to San Francisco soon after her birth. After relocating to Fairbanks, Alaska, she moved back to the city in 1961, spending her formative college years among the bohemian counterculture while studying art, theater and dancing. She moved to Los Angeles in 1967 where she studied drawing and became part of a radical artist community.
The Early Years and Gallery 32
The exhibit is organized chronologically, beginning with Jackson’s first mature drawings that she made during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. During this time, she ran Gallery 32, a self-funded exhibition space, out of her Los Angeles studio. Here, Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi were among the artists featured in The Sapphire Show: You’ve Come A Long Way Baby (1970), credited as the first survey of African American women artists in Los Angeles. What is Love brings together several artworks originally shown at Gallery 32 and will surface new research on its history.
Her dream imagery and symbolism is tied to animals, plants, hearts and hands that communicate human connection to nature, universal love, and unity. Originally exhibited at Ankrum Gallery, an important Los Angeles space for African American artists, Jackson’s integration of dance, music, ecology, and ancestral integration with nature culminates in her most ambitious canvas, In a Black Man’s Garden (1973). In this large-scale triptych, foliage floats and merges with introspective figures that also appear to defy gravity as though they are lost in internal worlds.
The 1980’s – Life Between Los Angeles, Idyllwild and San Francisco
During the 80’s, Jackson taught painting and dance in Idyllwild. While working in this small mountain town, she created small-scale studies of leaves, trees and the mountains that surrounded her. This section of the exhibition brings together her rarely seen paintings, works on paper and handmade books from this period. El Paradiso (1981-84), named after the bird of paradise, is a quintessential composition from this time, inspired by her father’s unexpected death in 1981.
Jackson earned an MFA in design at Yale University in 1990 and worked full-time designing costumes and sets for the theater. Experimentation was born out of necessity, and limited time and resources caused the artist to experiment with leftover scenic Bogus paper (thick sheets of paper that cover the floor when sets are painted). The Bogus paper paintings typically feature sculptural textures, a darker palette with rougher edges combined with forms that merge abstraction and figuration as in Sapphire & Tunis (2010-11). The painting’s name is a reference to the names of the artist’s maternal grandmother, Sapphire, and great-uncle, Tunis.
Savannah, Georgia and the Later Years
Suzanne Jackson moved to Savannah, Georgia in 1996 where she continues to live and work. Inspired by the landscape, she researched ancestral history and often brought her students from the Savannah College of Art and Design to sketch in locations with histories significant to enslavement. In this environment she developed otherworldly paintings that suspend acrylic paint in midair, embedding surfaces with personal ephemera along with found and sourced materials. These experimental three-dimensional pieces are inspired by her time in the theater. Referencing a moment in history, Crossing Ebenezer (2017) includes red netting from fire log bags suggesting both spilled blood and a distressed flag. The work memorializes a Civil War-era massacre of emancipated African Americans who were drowned in Ebenezer Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River.
What Feeds Us? (2025)
The exhibition concludes with What Feeds Us? (2025), a new commission reflecting on the global environmental crisis. Moss, tree bark, plastic bags and trash are integrated in this large-scale installation, built around a central sculptural component. Additional hanging elements combine acrylic paint with found objects such as African fabric scraps, Indian sari curtains, and Korean and Japanese papers. Visceral cultural objects act as symbols of migration and improvisation, and honors the link between all living things.
Suzanne Jackson’s retrospective asks the question What is Love? The answers she provides through her art seem to have everything to do with connection, nature, and the message that the shared stories comprising our human histories contain more similarities than differences.