Suzanne Jackson is a painter, printmaker, poet, dancer, and theater designer whose career resists categorization. Over the course of more than five decades, she has cultivated a practice that blends abstraction with the poetics of everyday life, often layering color, texture, and form to evoke memories, rhythms, and the natural world.

Born in St. Louis and raised in Alaska, Jackson studied painting at San Francisco State College and dance at the University of California, Berkeley, before relocating to Los Angeles in the 1960s. There she became a key figure in the city’s Black Arts scene, opening Gallery 32 (1968–70), an artist-run space that exhibited work by David Hammons, Betye Saar, Emory Douglas, and other now-renowned artists. The gallery functioned as a hub for creativity, collaboration, and community engagement, situating Jackson at the heart of a transformative cultural moment.

As a painter, Jackson’s work has shifted from figuration to abstraction, but has always maintained a distinctive sensitivity to atmosphere and gesture. Her early watercolors and prints, like the one in this collection, often incorporate whimsical, dreamlike imagery, including fish, birds, plants, and hearts, infused with a sense of intimacy and play. By the 1970s and onward, her canvases began to explore pure abstraction, drawing on her background in dance with sweeping, improvisational gestures and layered surfaces. In recent years, she has pioneered experimental methods, including acrylic paintings without stretchers, suspended like translucent veils, which emphasize process, materiality, and ephemerality.

In addition to her painting, Jackson has worked as a set designer, educator, and poet. Her career treats art as an ecosystem in which painting, dance, poetry, and teaching all converge.

Jackson’s contributions have been celebrated in major exhibitions, including Life Model: Charles White and His Students at LACMA (2019), Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 at the Hammer Museum(2011), and most recently her first full-career retrospective, Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, at the Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019). Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Selected Exhibitions

Two Generations of Black Artists, California State University, Los Angeles, CA, 1970

Blacks: USA: 1973; New York Cultural Center, NY, 1973

West Coast 74: The Black Image, 1974

Directions in Afro-American Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1974

California Black Artists, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, 1977

Contextures, Just Above Midtown Gallery, NY, 1978

19 Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-Evaluated, 1965-1975, California African American Museum, 1989, Hammer Museum, CA, 2011.

Life Model: Charles White and His Students, LACMA, CA, 2019

Suzanne Jackson: Light and Paper, Ortuzar Projects, NY, 2024

Whitney Biennial 2024: “Even Better Than the Real Thing”, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 2024

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love:
SFMOMA (Sept 2025–Mar 2026), co-organized with Walker Art Center. Her first major museum retrospective, tracing six decades of lyrical work and including a new large-scale commission.