Suzanne Jackson: Listen’ N Home

Suzanne Jackson has been making art professionally since the 1960s—first in Los Angeles, California, where she founded the artist-run space Gallery 32, and eventually in Savannah, Georgia, where she moved to teach in 1996. Her paths in painting included moments as a dancer on tour in South America and as a Yale School of Drama graduate, working as a scenic designer in national theaters. Jackson’s relocation to the south in the 1990s marked a shift in her visual idiom, which became more abstract, three-dimensional, and environmental. She worked intensively, yet in relative obscurity, during this period of her life in the building that remains to this day both her working and living space. The paintings and related drawings made in this era developed physical layers, warped surfaces, or projecting forms that incorporated materials of the studio and domestic life.

Most recently, Jackson’s paintings have taken a radical turn by lifting the pigment and medium off the canvas substrate, as no artist has done before. These partially transparent works suspend color, light, material, and form in mid-air, literally removing painting from the constraints of the support. Listen’ N Home conjures the imagined soundtrack to Jackson’s artmaking referencing blues, swing, and what she calls “Classical African American Music”. Through a selective representation of pivotal works from the past 20 years, as well as a newly made monumental installation, the exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago presents Jackson’s turn to environmental abstraction, marking the territory and trajectory of her late-life breakthrough paintings.