Experimental artist Suzanne Jackson celebrates decades of work in new exhibition

Geoff Bennett:

An artist who has spent decades experimenting with her materials is getting her first national exposure in her 80s.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Minneapolis to meet Suzanne Jackson for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

There are large paintings that hang in the air, inviting the viewer to walk around. There's no canvas, no backing at all. These are paintings literally made of layers of acrylic paint, along with some everyday household items, here, mesh bags, even peanut shells.

They're works that became a signature style for artist Suzanne Jackson.

Suzanne Jackson, Artist:

The painting becomes the surface and the support.

Jeffrey Brown:

The paint itself is the surface and the...

Suzanne Jackson:

The paint, the paint itself is the surface and support.

Jeffrey Brown:

Yes.

Suzanne Jackson:

Understanding the strength of paint and how it works with these bags. Some of these are vegetable produce bags.

Jeffrey Brown:

Yes, why are they in your painting?

Suzanne Jackson:

Because I don't throw things away.

(Laughter)

Suzanne Jackson:

And I -- well, just try -- and just looking. I look at something, and I think, OK, structurally, what can I do with the paint?

Jeffrey Brown:

She's been looking and painting a long time and now at 82 is having her first major museum retrospective, an exhibition titled What Is Love without a question mark that started at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is now at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

More than 50 works made since the 1960s, early representational paintings focused on two abiding subjects, Black figures and the natural world, and then a move toward abstraction and more sculptural three-dimensional pieces.

For the artist herself, it's a chance to look back at her love of painting, her obsession with what the medium itself can do.

Suzanne Jackson:

I look at them with curiosity about, what did I do? What was I doing each time? So I look at these and each one -- and even this morning, looking at this painting next to us, I was thinking it has texture that I didn't see before. It started to dry differently.

So this is an experiment, and all my life, it's been an experiment. That's what I see in the retrospective.

Jeffrey Brown:

Jackson spent her childhood in San Francisco, where her father was a city bus and cable car driver, and then, in Fairbanks, Alaska.

She was always making art, she says, teaching herself at first, before studying in the 1960s at San Francisco State University, and then in Los Angeles at the Otis Art Institute, where she took a drawing class with influential artist Charles White and met other young Black artists trying to make their way at a time when the institutional art world was still often closed to them.

Jackson turned her own L.A. studio into Gallery 32, a small self-funded exhibition space that was short-lived from 1968 to 1970, but highly impactful, with shows that included the first Los Angeles survey of Black women artists.

Suzanne Jackson:

Doing for ourselves and having exhibitions and supporting each other as young artists.

Jeffrey Brown:

Because that was necessary.

Suzanne Jackson:

Yes, so even to the last bowl of noodles. That was the way we helped each other out and supported each other. So that's really what it was about. It's being young people just determined to do the thing that you love the most.

Jeffrey Brown:

Her own creativity took different forms. She was a dancer, poet, theater set and costume designer. She had gallery shows and began teaching, eventually at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She continues to live and work in Savannah.

But for long periods, she was largely out of public view. In some ways, she says now, that was healthy, allowing her to play with new ideas.

Suzanne Jackson:

I was just doing it, just doing something. No one was paying attention to me, so I could do anything I wanted to do in the studio. That's really...

Jeffrey Brown:

Is that how it felt for...

Suzanne Jackson:

That's really how this happened.

Jeffrey Brown:

Yes?

Suzanne Jackson:

Because people weren't paying attention.

Jeffrey Brown:

Paintings on rough bogus paper, sculptural paintings pushing away from the wall, works like Woodpecker's Last Blues with feathers and leaves. Crossing Ebenezer, though, abstract, contains washes of red, the color of blood, and the flow of a river, recalling a Civil War era, mass drowning of emancipated African Americans.

Suzanne Jackson:

I'm interested in history. I'm interested in how we got here. And that's what the abstraction can do. It's not telling you a story directly. It's allowing you to think. I want people to think.

Jeffrey Brown:

It would be several decades before the outside world took full notice.

Suzanne Jackson:

For a long time, I felt as if I was not. There were other artists having recognition. I was still plugging along, still working. I think that's the thing. We kept working, no matter whether we received any recognition or not.

Jeffrey Brown:

Did you feel like your -- you would never get that full recognition? Were there times?

Suzanne Jackson:

I just didn't expect it. I might think, oh, it would be nice if I could do this, or I would go to exhibitions, or I'd watch PBS and see people being interviewed and think, oh, my, and all these younger artists are getting recognition, and many in my generation are being ignored.

Jeffrey Brown:

She's ignored no more. And the exhibition in the Twin Cities, she says, though planned years back, comes at an especially meaningful time following the murder of George Floyd and the more recent ICE surge, arrests and killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, traumatizing this community.

Suzanne Jackson:

For me, then, people coming in, if this is a place where they can come quietly and peacefully, I hope that it gives some kind of rest and peace.

Jeffrey Brown:

As for Jackson herself, she calls the retrospective a privilege, compelling her back to her studio to get to work.

A first major retrospective at 81, now 82, how does that feel?

Suzanne Jackson:

It's the beginning.

Jeffrey Brown:

It feels like a beginning?

Suzanne Jackson:

Yes.

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown:

Suzanne Jackson's exhibition What Is Love moves to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in September.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.