Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

For over six decades, Suzanne Jackson has created lyrical, awe-inspiring paintings influenced by her deep respect for the natural world and continual belief in the connection between all living things. Jackson’s life has been driven by a search for creative freedom and a bohemian spirit indebted to the San Francisco ethos of the 1950s and 1960s in which she was raised. Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love — the first retrospective devoted to the full breadth of her career — celebrates her groundbreaking artistic vision through more than 80 paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that emphasize her innovative use of color, light, and structure to expand the parameters of painting and illuminate beauty, peace, and love. Organized chronologically, the exhibition spans early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of pigment and imagery from her dreams to recent three-dimensional paintings suspended in midair and often embedded with materials that draw on ancestral and cultural histories. The presentation concludes with a new large-scale installation that reflects on the global environmental crisis and migration.

Jackson has led an expansive creative life as an artist, as well as a dancer, poet, theater designer, and an ardent supporter of other artists. The exhibition highlights these multifaceted aspects of her career by bringing together artworks that were originally shown at Gallery 32, a self-funded exhibition space that Jackson ran out of her Los Angeles studio from 1968 to 1970, ephemera documenting Jackson’s work as the artistic coordinator for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) in the late 1970s, and a selection of her stage and costume designs.