Interview from NER 44.1 (2023)
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uzanne Jackson has been active for more than six decades as an artist; her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. In addition to being a distinguished visual artist, in her travels she has been a gallery owner, a dancer, a poet, a set and costume designer, and a teacher. Her scenic designs and costume designs have been featured at many theaters, ranging from Berkeley Repertory Theatre to Mark Taper Forum. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in painting from San Francisco State College (now University) and a Master of Fine Arts in design from Yale School of Drama. Jackson founded the renowned artist-controlled space Gallery 32 in Los Angeles. Her visual idiom crosses artistic spaces, ranging from environmental abstraction to three-dimensional breakthrough paintings. Her visual artist’s pursuit continues to engage audiences with monumental installations and mid-air paintings. Jackson is an original artist who is doing things on canvas that have never been done before. Jackson is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Jacob Lawrence Award, Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). She is now busier than ever; I am fortunate that she took the time out of her busy schedule to sit and have two conversations with me about her life and artistic adventures.
The artworks included with this interview, all from 2021, appear courtesy of Ortuzar Projects, New York.
—NGN
IN THE BEGINNING
NGN:
You were born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and spent your early childhood in San Francisco, but your family then moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, from 1952 to 1961. What was it like, growing up in San Francisco and Alaska at that time?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I was nine months old when my parents moved to San Francisco. My dad was a milkman in St. Louis, then moved to San Francisco to work in the shipyards during World War II. After the war, he drove the trolleys and the cable cars in San Francisco. As a child I rode everywhere on the trolleys with him, all over San Francisco, seeing Sargent Johnson’s murals and going to Coit Tower and seeing the murals there.
After a point, my father decided that he would go to Guam and my mother said, “I would rather you go to Alaska than Guam.” Three weeks later, he came back and said, “Guess what? I’m going to Alaska.” Because he had been a milkman and because he drove the trolleys, he qualified as a teamster, then was hired by Peter Kiewit and Sons to drive a forklift, which I think was probably the first time a person of color was allowed to drive a forklift and hired to do that job.
Basically, my father went to Alaska in 1951 to finish the Alcan Highway that originally was started by Black soldiers during the war, which is a big part of history that people are finally acknowledging.
While he was in Alaska, one day I broke out in tears; my mother called my dad and said, “She misses you and wants to come up.” So, we went up for a month or two. When we got to Alaska, the teachers took me in the same day that my mother registered me. They made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and gave me an apple. I liked it, my mother never made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That’s how welcoming they were immediately.
By 1952, it was decided that we would move permanently to Fairbanks and my dad got all of the guys out of the house who were living with him and made that our permanent house on Seventeenth Avenue and Fairbanks. Of those guys who were living with my dad, one of them was Tiny, from the Our Gang comedy, a big fat white guy; another one was Uncle Bill; there was Uncle Tommy, who was a dry cleaner—a Black person doing dry cleaning. There was this mixture of guys that were living with my dad who were my adopted uncles for the rest of my life, really, until my dad passed away and they all passed away. These were some of the pioneer guys who came up to Fairbanks. I went to Catholic school there, a Jesuit school from fourth grade all the way through twelfth grade.
NGN:
Geography is always important. Was there a Black community in Alaska at the time?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
We lived on Seventeenth Avenue, which was just at the city limit, near the military base. At first it was called Ladd Army Airfield; later it changed to Fort Wainwright. The planes would fly almost directly over our house, going and coming. Black military men were there. My oldest friend, Joseph Lewis Searles III, who recently passed away [July 26, 2021], was the first African-American man to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange as a floor broker in 1970. He came up as a teenager to Fairbanks, because his parents were at the military base. By that time, I was at the Jesuit school, but there was also a large public school, Lathrop High School, where several Black kids went.
NGN:
You talked about your father; what did your mother do?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
In St. Louis, before she married my dad, my mother was a seamstress and had a little sewing shop with Marva Trotter, the woman who became Joe Louis’s first wife. My mother was a seamstress and a designer even in San Francisco. Before we left San Francisco when I was five, my mother had designed clothes and made pretty dresses and I was a model for those in a fashion show. She also worked and won a design award at Koret of California during the last months of the war. So, when my mother went to Alaska, she made all our clothes, even my father’s shirts.
My mother was also a member of NAFAD (National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers). NAFAD was primarily Black women working in the fashion industry at that time. That’s what she had done most of her life. I think when she married my father she had been studying at Stowe Teachers College (now Harris-Stowe State University). Teachers weren’t supposed to get married. So that ended her career, and I am the one she educated.
NGN:
I ask this next question because you went on to engage in several artistic endeavors: poet, set designer, gallery owner, dancer, and visual artist. Who were influential figures in your life as a child?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
My parents and my teachers, but my parents especially, with Dad taking me around San Francisco, looking at all the fabulous architecture. My dad was a real estate broker, but if he could have been, he might have become an architect or something like that. My parents owned and operated barbeque restaurants in Saint Louis, San Francisco, and Fairbanks. When we returned to San Francisco they opened another soul food restaurant on Ocean Avenue during the sixties. My mother operated an ice cream/penny candy store, as a safe place for kids for twenty-plus years (“Mrs. J’s Sweet Shoppe”). My father was the president of the Ingleside–Ocean Avenue neighborhood. Their lifelong entrepreneurship and community involvement, as I was growing up, was a strong influence.
In Alaska, it was my teachers at school who made every possibility available for us. Every year, from the eighth grade, I entered the poster contest for World Peace for Kindness to Animals. My freshman year I received the Watson-Guptill Honorable Mention Prize. I still have the watercolor book. And by my senior year, I received three fellowships, including a national 4-H scholarship.
BECOMING AN ARTIST
NGN:
You moved back to San Francisco in 1961 when you were seventeen, and attended San Francisco State, where you studied art, dance, and drama, and even once, through a State Department program, traveled to South America as a ballerina. What would you like to share about your time there?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
At San Francisco State, I also studied creative writing. I didn’t have to take English One and I was put in a creative writing class with a man named Jack Sheedy, who was a saxophonist. The instructors at San Francisco State, at that time, were really an interesting combination.
I started dance classes in 1957 and performed in Fairbanks. In San Francisco, my mother told me about Alan Howard, who was teaching at Pacific Ballet and had started the Academy of Ballet. He had been a dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo but was in an accident and couldn’t work professionally anymore, so he started the Pacific Ballet Academy. I was in the junior corps of the ballet with the company. Because of Mr. Howard, the Bolshoi and New York City Ballet companies would rehearse at Pacific Ballet. I did not travel anywhere with Pacific Ballet.
At that time, Arthur Mitchell was with the New York City Ballet (this was before he started the Dance Theatre of Harlem). I remember sitting there with Arthur Mitchell fewer than two or three feet away from me, while he was rehearsing Agon with this tiny dancer. All I remember is this Black dancer with muscles; this was a big deal at that time for anybody of color. My heroine dancer was Janet Collins, who was the first Black prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera.
There were very few Black ballet dancers. I was in the performances at San Francisco State and studied ballet, European folk dance, modern dance. People don’t realize that San Francisco State was actually a professional school: professional theater, professional film. It qualified, especially later, when I was applying to Yale.
NGN:
The Watts rebellion of 1965 captured the anger of the 1960s. In retrospect, what would you like to share about that period and Black visual artists of that time, also the anger, the rebellion, and everything that was going on?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I was still in San Francisco in 1965, just finishing my classes. To show you how naïve I was, when Watts was burning, I said, “Oh my goodness, the Watts Towers are burning.” That’s all I knew about Watts, the Watts Towers of Simon Rodia. And a white friend said, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you realize there is a Black community in Watts?” No, I did not know that. I had just come from Alaska. I was focused on theater, dance, and art—all of that. I really didn’t know any of the communities in 1965 in Los Angeles.
NGN:
Speaking of the 1960s, the curator Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins stated, “The activists and artists of this turbulent decade were visionaries. They illustrated what could be if one took control, took charge, took a chance and reaffirmed one’s identity. We are all better for it.”1
SUZANNE JACKSON:
Well, we knew less about the people who came before us. The only book was James A. Porter’s book on Black art (Modern Negro Art), until Samella Lewis published Black Artists on Art (1969) with Ruth Waddy, and later a book on [sculptor and graphic artist] Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). Elizabeth Catlett was another mentor for me. Now you can learn all of this on the internet. I see a lot of imitators now, younger people who are getting a great deal of recognition and making a lot of money. We had a different kind of struggle because basically we were told that we weren’t mainstream. We did not know the history, and we weren’t given exhibitions in galleries and museums.
I was fortunate, though, because [actor, poet, and athlete] Bernie Casey, after he saw my work in my studio at Gallery 32, introduced me to Joan Ankrum. Ankrum Gallery had already been showing Samella Lewis, Bernie Casey, and artists of all colors—Ankrum and Heritage Gallery, across the street, were only two places in town that people-of-color works were being shown in any way, shape, or form.
So I exhibited in my first museum show in 1968, sold my first painting, and then also was connected with Ankrum Gallery by 1969. And then had my first solo show in Los Angeles by 1972. Although Larry Walker, in the Bay area, gave me a solo show at the museum gallery, at University of the Pacific, that was really my first solo show. Larry Walker, Kara Walker’s dad—
NGN:
Really, Kara Walker’s dad, you said?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
That’s right. Kara was a baby on the floor, saying, “I need something.” And I thought, “This is a really special child.” Yeah, I always felt that Larry didn’t receive the recognition that he should have.
NGN:
You mentioned Bernie Casey seeing your work at Gallery 32 first. Can you tell us more about this gallery, which you founded in 1969, in Los Angeles?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
While I was at Gallery 32, we had the Black Panthers’ exhibition. Emory Douglas’s work and Elaine Brown’s album Seize the Time (1969) were also presented at Gallery 32 for the first time. Another artist, Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor, had her show about oppressed people at Gallery 32. So, I guess the Panthers saw her show and they decided Gallery 32 was the place to have a fundraiser for their Free Breakfast for School Children Program. They wanted me to give the gallery up to them and I said no, because more people of all kinds could come into a neutral place and see all sorts of art. And people did get to see Emory Douglas’s work, his pastel drawings, as well as his illustrations.
NGN:
In 1975, you were appointed to the California Arts Commission. Anything you would like to say about that experience?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
When I moved back to Los Angeles, where I had a 5,000 square-foot loft space, I received a telephone call one morning from Jacques Barzaghi [policy adviser; died June 1, 2021], who was with Jerry Brown. He said, “You have been appointed to the California Arts Council, and you’re going to be on it whether you like it or not because the governor said so.”
Once Jerry Brown became governor, in 1976, he was able to appoint me and Gary Snyder, who had just received the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island,2 and William Allaudin Matthieu, who was the director of the Sufi Choir. He appointed us to the Arts Commission, joining Brock Peters, to fill it out, to have artists on it. As a result, we started to have discussions with people who were the upper crust, with money. Well, you have got to recognize that California is also a big state; there are different areas and regions and different kinds of artists. I think they had an extra $35,000 or something left in the budget, and there were four of us artists left on that old commission. They gave each of us a certain amount of money to go out into the community to find the kind of art we thought they should be representing. Allaudin found a Sufi master, and I found the Woman’s House in the Fillmore District, San Francisco. Brock Peters chose The Watts Prophets. I can’t remember what Gary Snyder found, though it probably was something to do with the environment.
That was the most incredible experience. I will never forget it, meeting people like Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). She was quiet most of the time, but this was a woman who grew up in a US–Japanese internment camp and whose whole life was devoted to her art and family. And she was really well-recognized in the Bay Area. She was one of the early Black Mountain artists. Eventually, I went to work with El Teatro Campesino, designing the costumes for Rose of the Rancho. That show was originally going to be on horseback—an opera on horseback! But they could not get the state to approve that part of it. So it was performed in the Old Spaghetti Factory, where they had their theater. For me, that was important, because even when I was in an Alaskan school, Father Renner, our German instructor, told us about the plight of farm workers, and how they didn’t have facilities, and that the lettuce and food we were eating—that people may have had to relieve themselves while they were working there, and I never forgot that.
NGN:
You mentioned earlier that Bernie Casey first introduced you to the Ankrum Gallery. I didn’t know that Bernie Casey was a visual artist; I only knew him as a football player and for his career as an actor. What would you like to share about him and his artistic work?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
Bernie Casey was a football player because he could get a scholarship to go to college and study art, which is what he really wanted to do. When I first met him, he was painting these sort of flowery paintings, these delicate things. And it was always a big joke because he was a big guy, and he had this little bitty studio and little paintings. And I had this giant studio, a little person with big paintings. So it was always a joke we could have with each other. But, yes, he was the one that introduced me to Ankrum Gallery. He’d like to say, “I am the one who discovered you.”
Bernie Casey is also how I got to the Savannah College of Art and Design. He was on the board there, and one day he called and said there was this couple in Savannah who’d seen him on Good Morning America. They were starting an art college, and they called him and said, “Would you mind coming to our school and having an exhibition?” and he said, “Of course.” Then, as a result, he introduced them to Phoebe Beasley, Maya Angelou, and all these other artists he knew. They have a very good African American art collection because of Bernie Casey.
NGN:
You were closely connected to a group of artists and activists (Gloria Bohanon, Senga Nengudi, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Emory Douglas, George Evans, Alonzo Davis, Dan Concholar, Betye Saar, and others). Could you speak about your connection to these artists?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
We are like family; we are still like family, all of us. I just felt as if we were all cooking at the same time, the West Coast and the East Coast. It was a struggle, but it was a good time, and we were learning from one another. People like John Outterbridge—they don’t mention John now, but they mentioned him all the time for a while. John Outterbridge (1933–2020), Curtis Tann (1915–1992), and John Riddle (1933–2002)—those were the spiritual mentors for those of us who were the next generation, after people like Samella Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White (1918–1979). We worked together and the men supported the women. When we had the women’s exhibition, they supported us.
NGN:
You mentioned that you studied creative writing as well as theater and art, so I want to talk a little about your poetry.
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I was in the first group of the Cave Canem poets (founded in 1996), and I was mentored by Lucille Clifton (1936–2010), who was the Poet Laureate of Maryland at that time. I was originally a member of the International Women’s Writing Guild.
I have two books published, Animal and What I love. The first book, What I love, was part of an angry response to the period, 1968 to 1970—it was about everyday life, experiences, and nature. Animal was more about documenting animals and nature.
I am interested in nature now, especially our human relationship with nature, but the early poetry was romantic and about personal relationships: love, exchange, friendship. I haven’t been writing as much poetry as I would like. My latest pieces are responses for the upcoming Glasgow exhibition; they asked me to write some very quick things that had to do with the paintings.
NGN:
In theater, you worked with both Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks. What can you tell us about that?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I designed one of Lynn Nottage’s plays, Santa Bernadisa, even though I have seen a different title for it. Raphael Clement, an actor in the play, said, “I don’t remember what I wore in that play.” And I said, “Well, it was a loin cloth and some feathers; I still have the feathers on my dresser.’’
Lynn taught at Yale for a while, and here at SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design]. Sharon Ott, who became a theater instructor here, directed one of Lynn Nottage’s plays [Intimate Apparel]. I’m glad to know that Lynn is doing well now. She received the MacArthur genius award and the Pulitzer Prize.
NGN:
Lynn is the only African-American woman to win two Pulitzer Prizes for drama.
SUZANNE JACKSON:
That’s amazing. And Suzan-Lori Parks—I love her works. I worked on her play with Peter Brosius in Los Angeles, in 1993. I did the costumes for Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. I felt like her writing was the way my painting is. I think I bought every play that she has written. One time I was standing at the train depot in New Haven, and there was another woman there and we kept looking at each other. We were too shy to say hello and I had a feeling it might have been Suzan-Lori. I wished I had said hello because I really loved working on her play.
NGN:
From 1982 to 1985, you were chair of the fine arts department of the Elliott Pope Preparatory School in Idyllwild, California—
SUZANNE JACKSON:
It was originally Desert Sun School, which is a better name for that school. That was right after my father passed away in 1981. I was asked to come up to what was then University of Southern California Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts. Actually, Noah Purifoy (1917–2004) had told me about this place up in the mountains that was so beautiful; he attended the Salk Institute. And I said, That sounds perfect. I loved the sound of it, talking about the foggy road and the eyes of creatures along the side of the road. And miles high—so I was invited to come up to be interviewed, to become the next painting instructor.
NGN:
You also attended Yale, where you earned your MFA in theater design. What was that experience like?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
That was later, when I was forty-four, and I was the first Black woman to finish the design program.
I had seen the picture of Lloyd Richards [dean of the Yale School of Drama] in Black Enterprise magazine in my father’s office, in an article asking for people of color. I applied. I had to go to New York for something, and I decided to catch the train to New Haven and had an in-person interview. I was interviewed by Ming Cho Lee and Michael Yeargan and the director Leon Katz. Ming liked the two-story set design I had designed at the Desert Sun School, but he also liked the drawings I had done when I was a teenager at San Francisco State that were from the de Young Museum. There were some ink and pencil drawings in a little sketchbook that I just happened to throw into the portfolio, and I also illustrated an obscure Nigerian play for the application portfolio.
Ming actually asked me to come into New York and just work with him, but I told him I had a fifteen-year-old son and really needed to have a stable place for him. So that’s how I got into the program. I was accepted but I found out later that Ming also had received a Guggenheim Fellowship to find out why it was that students were coming to grad school who could not draw. He chose three of us who could draw for that class. They usually only took eight students into a class, and the three of us made eleven in our class, but we could draw.
NGN:
As a successful visual artist, what do you think are some of the essentials that you shared with your students at SCAD, where you were a professor of painting and taught full-time from 1996 until 2009?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I was always interested in passion and taught that you have to have a passion for what you want to do. It was always funny; I’d say: “What is passion? You got to have passion.” The boys would raise their hands because they’re thinking lust. But you just really have to do it because you do not want to do anything else.
Also persistence, and not to be afraid to take some risks in the work; to try some things and even to mess up or fail—that is a way to learn.
I learned that in high school; there was one person in high school who had As in everything. I remember the one time when we were trying to find what was the meaning of the word agricola in Latin, and he couldn’t figure it out for the world. And me with my little hand up, B minus or C student, I said, “Oh, that has to do with agriculture.” He was so embarrassed and so upset. I’m thinking that’s so obvious. We had Latin, French, English, and German when I was at school.
That was a little lesson for me. When you make mistakes, you learn things. If you don’t make any mistakes, you get everything right all the time, then you don’t really learn anything. Sometimes, you’ve got to mess up. I’ve had a messy life in some places; I’ve messed up several times. I don’t see success yet; I’m still pushing and trying to figure out what I can do to make paintings better. They’re not there yet, as far as I’m concerned. I’m still working on them, which is the reason these young people in galleries are having a good time with me, because I’m not quitting.
When Elizabeth Catlett came to Savannah, she was giving a talk at the Telfair. It was the Telfair Academy then; they didn’t have the Jepson Center, the contemporary art center, yet. She came in and her son Juan was helping her walk down the aisle. I stood up because I hadn’t seen her in years, and I thought she would remember me. Of course, she did, and then she sat down in front and took off her glasses and read the little talk she was going to do. Then she said, “I can’t wait to get home because I have a ton of marble coming in and I’m going to start a new piece of sculpture.” She was eighty-eight years old at that point. That to me was so inspiring—just the idea that she’s not stopping, she’s still going, she’s still making work, and you can’t stop. Every time I think I’m not going to do another thing; I end up doing six more.
THE WORK ITSELF
NGN:
You have been painting since you were a child. Why painting?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I love color, I guess; my mother would have me writing to my grandma and grandpa and making pictures for them. I didn’t realize it so much until I had the retrospective and I found some of my childhood drawings in the hope chest that my mother had saved. When I was a baby and we had just moved to San Francisco, my mother’s brothers were stationed at Treasure Island, and I found a drawing of the way Treasure Island probably looked between 1944 and 1949, with a Quonset hut and a tall building, in the middle of the Bay Bridge.
I was doing things from memory and observation as a child, and I am still about that. I really prefer to work from observation, and memory, and imagination. Oh, and one thing I remember: my mother used to paint the insides of the kitchen cabinets aqua. She loved that color and then everything else was white. I remember that we would go to a big warehouse, somewhere in the Bay View district, and there was this European man who had racks of big paint cans. He would shake up the color and mix up the colors for my mother. That was probably one of my first experiences with seeing paint being mixed up and seeing all the colors.
NGN:
How do you know when to start a piece and how do you know you are finished?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
It’s always hard to start in the beginning and put down some color or a shape of something, but then that feeds the next thing. I also work on three, four, or five things at a time because of long drying times.
If I work on the table, it’s almost like watercolor; it’s very washy and it takes a little longer to dry. This year, because it’s been so hot, I’m back and forth between heat and the air conditioning. I’m having to learn how to deal with that; when I first moved here, I was trying to learn how to deal with humidity.
When it’s finished, it just speaks; it tells you it’s ready—”don’t touch me anymore”—or you let it hang or sit there for a few days. If you don’t go back again to it, sometimes that means it’s over.
Sometimes, like the pieces that went to the Mnuchin Gallery—those were supposed to be for the show in Scotland next year—they grabbed them up so fast, about sixteen pieces out of the studio that I didn’t expect.
I wasn’t quite sure about one or two pieces, but I had to work carefully when I knew the deadline was coming for when they had to pick them up. And then I had to think about it. I must keep working, and working, and working until I’m satisfied with the strength of the piece, especially now that I’m working with pure acrylic paint.
I also have to make sure those paintings are really strong, because they are malleable and flexible according to the air in the room; each time they’re installed might be a little bit different. I have to keep them until I know that they’re really solid and that the pure acrylic is going to hold and stay that way forever, because I do not believe in sending out work that is not well made.
NGN:
Your work spans a vast period: from the Civil Rights movement and the Feminist movement to the social and political movements of the twenty-first century. How has your artwork changed over the years?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
Well, it changed because of my moving around, probably, and because of my growing up, becoming more mature. Life does that to you. When I moved to the Idyllwild, California, mountains, the paintings were small and about the environment. Los Angeles, light. Light is so important. Almost all the artists in Los Angeles and Georgia talk about light and space. Moving to the East Coast, everything is jammed together there. The artwork becomes more, I think, busy, and full of stuff because there is not the same kind of wide-open space as there is when you cross the Mississippi River and go West. It is just a totally different way of looking at things.
NGN:
You have worked in a selection of visual media, including works on canvas, works on paper, and monoprints. And your style has changed over the years. What is consistent about your work, in terms of methods and techniques?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
That’s interesting that people think the style has changed. It’s just that I was working more figuratively early on and learning to paint.
What I’ve noticed is that acrylic paint has changed. I started working with it from the very beginning, when it was starting to be used in the fine arts. When my oil paints were stolen, I had to switch over to Nova Color, which a friend told me about. It’s more flexible to paint with, but I had learned to paint with oil. I used the Old Masters oil layering and to make luminosity, and now I do that with acrylic. My work represents all the developments of acrylic paint over the years, all the way up to now. Though I still use color and movement and shapes the same way. The paint is layered and layered, and that’s pretty much the same as what I’ve been doing all my life.
NGN:
What has inspired you most in your artistic endeavors; what sort of things gave you the nerve to go with it?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
Nature. I collect insects. I love trees. I have birds in my backyards. People think of my book Animal as a sensuous book, about people, but it is really based on a television documentary I saw on animals, where a penguin gives a rock to his lover. I love watching documentaries on nature. Just recently, I was watching one on the Galápagos and Borneo, the secret places in the world, like the caves. Some of the drawings I’m doing right now—two of them that I’ve been working on for the past year—have these funny little creatures in them. It surprised me a couple of weeks ago when I was watching a documentary: the same little creatures that I’m drawing and putting in my drawings actually exist deep down in the ocean!
Sometimes I make up things, but then it turns out some of those are real, like microbial systems. I have always had a theory that we are not separated from one another; between each of us there are atoms, we’re all connected.
That’s been something I thought about for a long time; even with white space, which is not negative space, there are the under layers of color that connect one form to the next.
When I was designing costumes, I loved using these raw silks. The peasant clothes can be silk and beautiful, but they look rough on stage. And I realized that I use a lot of earthy colors. I love the earth color in my work, but I have a lot of gold and bronzes and a range from the paint company and then I like to overlay them to see what I can find that is new.
NGN:
You have so many large structural, suspended acrylic pieces. I wondered if you work on these large structures by yourself. Do you have assistants working with you or someone lifting and moving stuff with you?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I lift and move by myself, but I have big ladders and little ladders. Before the Joan Mitchell grant, I was working originally on hollow core doors on buckets, which meant I had to bend over and strain my back. After I received the Joan Mitchell grant, I bought some sturdy worktables; one set rolls for me, but it is too high. The tables in the main studio, which are about ninety-six square inches, now are on the ground. It’s a tight squeeze in there, but it is okay for me. I insert D rings into my paintings because that’s the best thing to hold them safely, and then I can clamp the D rings and lift them up. The big piece I’m working on now is over 170 inches by ninety-six inches. It’s fitting on the table barely; I can pull it up and then I can also flip it myself. If it is sturdy enough, I can do that.
NGN:
Do you make a distinction between art and craft?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
Well, we were at the Whitney the other day, where they have a section labeled art and craft. Now, in that section, there was Rauschenberg (1925–2008); there was Agnes Martin (1912–2004), with her little graphic things; there was Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). There were a whole bunch of artists in there and we were saying, “Wait a minute, how are you calling that craft?”
None of that seemed related to craft, though it could in the sense of craftsmanship, in the sense of the ability to make something well with your hands. But I don’t think Agnes Martin is craft or Ruth Asawa, because she crochets metal, or Rauschenberg. Does any of that sound like craft to you, in the traditional way that you think of it? Dave the Potter (David Drake, c. 1800–1870) was a fine craftsperson.
We used to be taught that you put art into categories, and if it’s folk art, it’s craft. They used to call it outsider art; now they’re calling it some other name. I think it is ridiculous, because that puts artwork into a category that says it’s not good enough to be over here in the fine arts. But now they just put all these fine art people over here in arts and crafts at the Whitney! But I see it all is fine art now.
LOOKING FORWARD
NGN:
You were seventy-five when you had your solo show in New York at Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca in 2019. What did this mean to you to have this solo show in Manhattan?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I was happy to have a really good venue to show my work. I had shown in New York before, a funny little solo show, of very tiny paintings. Gretna Campbell (1922–1987) had just passed away and they had her giant paintings in the main gallery, while mine were stuck in the back. And I had a show in Brooklyn, during the snowiest, coldest winter ever. It was like trudging through Antarctica.
The 2019 solo show was important because it’s a major gallery, and its owner, Ales Ortuzar, had worked with David Zwirner Gallery before. I just felt confident about him when they came here to look at my work in the studio. I knew that they would do things elegantly, in the way that things had been done at Ankrum Gallery, but even better because there’s more money now.
What shocked me, really shocked me, in that first show was that they sold almost everything—even all these little watercolors that had been hanging around here for a thousand years, stuff in my studio that I hadn’t shown anywhere.
NGN:
You have had exhibitions all over the world. Has the gallery’s location or region played a role in your work?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
No. Right now I am planning to do a show in Glasgow, a solo show that opens in January (2022). That’s what I’m looking forward to now, but I’m just doing the work. I know what the space looks like. I chose the portion of the gallery I want; it has skylights for daytime, and it has places where I can hang things center.
I also think in proportion to the scale of the space, of what’s being chosen. Sometimes the director there and the Ortuzar team here may work together, saying, “These pieces are going to look best.” They may choose certain pieces to install, and I will be there for installation.
NGN:
You have argued that to become an artist it takes a whole lifetime. Considering your achievements, and accomplishments, do you consider yourself now to be an artist?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
(She laughs.) My achievements and accomplishments? That’s so funny; I guess I’m not seeing myself outside of where I am in my little rusty space. It has taken a lifetime, and I think that the original way we were taught was that you’re going to work in your studio for quite some time before you even have an exhibition or before you get to show in a museum.
Having my catalogue done—a survey, not really a retrospective—just puts everything in correct order. To correct the mistakes that have been written, that’s what I wanted to do in the catalogue. Now having my work at a gallery that can place my work in major museums, that is an accomplishment. They’re working now to do a beautiful monograph, which is going to be huge, from the way it sounds.3
I met people like Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) and Elizabeth Catlett, people who were up at this age, and when very young I said, By the time I’m forty I’m going to be like Louise Nevelson.
Well, at forty, I was struggling like crazy, just trying to get by. You have to earn whatever it is that you receive. I was a bit taken aback when Joan Ankrum wrote that she thought that I was going to become the best Black woman artist around. I thought that was really embarrassing, because there are all those other Black women out there who are really good.
Now I realize that I’m doing something that no one else has done. It’s really good work and it’s going to get better. So, I don’t feel so embarrassed about that statement about my becoming one of the best Black women artists around—you can say “one of the best.” I don’t need to say “the best”; there are too many good ones. I feel better about that now because I feel like I am achieving it in the work, making it stronger and better.
NGN:
Many people advocate that creativity is a key to healthy aging. How has your work changed over the years, and how has your creativity aged?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
At first, I was not happy that people were looking at work that was forty, fifty years old. Now, I’m seeing how I have grown as a painter. In the beginning, I was still learning to paint. Some of the early works reflect what I was learning from Charles White about structure of the body, the figure, the face. And from then on, they show how I was just experimenting with acrylic paint, and also being a young, romantic person on my own in Los Angeles, after being in South America and meeting other Black artists.
I think my work has matured as a result of my experimenting with materials. Probably being isolated at different times of my life, just having life changes, growing up and having a son and raising him, having parents, grandparents, different relationships, moving from place to place—those things add up. Then teaching, which was something I had not planned to do. I am learning all the time. Also, because I’ve lived West Coast, East Coast, now in the South, there’s a reflection of my experiences in each area, and with the people that I encounter.
Now as I am older, within the past five or six years, experimenting with the paint in a different way, I am really finding my own identity within the painting, and I do not want my work to look like anyone else’s.
Even now, I am looking at a piece across the room that most people would think is finished, but I’m still wanting to push the painterly aspects. So, I think that’s what I’ve come to now. Aging is a maturity within the work.
NGN:
Many well-established Black visual artists have died since we did the first part of this interview, months ago. Some you knew very well and spoke highly of them. Here are only some of the names that I know, and there may be others: Vivian Hewitt (1920–2022); Sam Gilliam (1933–2022); Samella Lewis (1923–2022); Fred Carter (1938–2022); Moe Brooker (1940–2022); Leroy Johnson (1937–2022). How do you think these pioneering Black figures should be honored more in the art world?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
I had to do some research on a couple of people that I had forgotten—like Leroy Johnson—but I think Moe Brooker’s work is just fabulous, outstanding work. And Vivian Hewitt and her husband also, as collectors.
Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to a buffet by some collectors here from Georgia, the Thompsons. They may have also been influenced by Vivian Hewitt and her husband. But what I think is important now is to recognize the role of Black collectors.
This is especially important for young people, and young curators in museums. Everybody wants to be a curator in the museum, but we really need to see, for instance, venues like Samella Lewis’s museum. It started from a storefront, which was called the Gallery for the Museum of African American Art. And it needed archivists and curators who knew what they were doing to hold it together, for forty-five plus years. I personally feel that her name should be on it. It should be the Samella Lewis Museum of African American Art. I was shocked to find out when she passed away that there were some people who had not heard of Samella Lewis. How do you not hear of the person who wrote Black Artists on Art and published it with Ruth Waddy? And then wrote the big books on Elizabeth Catlett?
Many African American artists have been in collections all along, but we are not known. Sam Gilliam’s exhibition was the whole top floor for the opening of the Jepson Center, that major museum in Savannah designed by Moshe Safdie. How many people know that?
My own first solo show in New York was 2019. Sam Gilliam’s first solo show in New York was also 2019. I just found that out in his obituary! Where have we been as Black people who really should be in the know?
We’ve got a few collectors, people like the Hewitts, the Thompsons, and several others, who started collecting African American art, by helping us out with affordable amounts, and now have major collections. And I think writers, curators, African American curators, need to really focus on who these collectors are. The collectors that I visited last week, basically, their house is a museum with every African American artist you can imagine.
They have been supporting us, and I think that needs to be known. There are so many African Americans who quietly supported us within their means, with what were considered small amounts, in the past. Now their collections are valuable, and we need to secure that within our heritage and places, and into institutions, and make sure those collections are really secure. So that’s my point about those people who’ve just passed away. They are our heritage.
NGN:
What advice do you have for emerging Suzanne Jacksons?
SUZANNE JACKSON:
You’ve got to work hard; you must be persistent; you have to have discipline; and you have to not give up. You have to just keep going no matter what, even if you have family.
One artist I remember telling his women students to take the largest room in the house.
You need to have studio space; and you have to take time to work. Children understand.
It is really hard to balance all of that and be a good partner. I think I’ve always been a good partner; I just had some people who thought I was going to make them rich. People see you sometimes for more than what you are, I think. Stay humble and also learn.
Also, just understanding how galleries run. Be courteous; say thank you; knowing a little bit about the business of art; knowing what you have to do on the way up. You may have to be in a lot of shows, but you must also be very picky about which shows you are in—with attention to the quality of work with which you are showing.
Integrity. Honesty. Don’t harm anyone in order to get ahead. Remain true to yourself; remain true to your goal—those are some of the things I have for all future creative folks: to be themselves. ■
Blossoms, 2021
1 Alice Sunshine, “Art from the Watts Rebellion,” People’s Daily World, Wednesday, August 2, 1989, p. 11. How is art from Black artists different today than the art created in the 1960s by Black artists?
2 “In 1975 California poet Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems Turtle Island, and Governor-elect Brown appointed him to chair a new California Arts Council made up of primarily working artists—a radically, suspiciously, new concept in the field. Eight working artists besides Gary were invited to join, myself among them: Allaudin Matthieu, director of the Sufi Choir, sculptor Noah Purifoy, graphics artist Suzanne Jackson, film director Alexander Mackendrick, theater director and playwright, Luis Valdez, visual artist Ruth Asawa, and the sole non-artist, Karney Hodge, the President of the American Symphony Orchestra League.” (Peter Coyote) http://www.petercoyote.com/keynote1998.html.
3 Now to be published by SFMOMA.