Suzanne Jackson

Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist with a decorated career spanning five decades, working across diverse media such as painting, printmaking, poetry, dance, theater, and more. Although she was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1944, she spent her earliest years in San Francisco and her teenage years in Alaska before returning to the Bay Area for her university studies at San Francisco State University. Jackson now works in Savannah, Georgia, where she has resided since 1996.

Jackson reached immense success in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was based in Los Angeles and operated Gallery 32, showing colleagues such as David Hammons, Betye Saar, Senga Nengudi, and more. In the earlier years of her career, Jackson created lyrical works featuring figures and symbols that would intertwine to foreground a delicate surface charged with philosophical questions about Blackness, femininity, love, counterculture, and other themes that reflected the diverse influences of her personal life and the social atmosphere of the time. Recently, the artist has focused on “anti-canvases” made entirely of acrylic paint save partial support of rods, netting, or gathered detritus that oscillate between luminosity and substantiality, two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, or materiality and ethereality.

A 2024 recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting, Suzanne Jackson has found her works notably featured in Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, along with major survey exhibitions such as Finding Aid, Goldsmith’s Center for Contemporary Art, London, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Suzanne Jackson: Listen’ N Home, the Arts Club of Chicago. Her works are represented in the collections of renowned museums such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, among others. The artist will open her first major retrospective at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2025.