Cut / Slip for Flowers, 2020

Acrylic paint and D-rings
© Suzanne Jackson; courtesy the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York. Photo by Ian Reeves.

Suzanne Jackson is renowned as the force behind Los Angeles’s short-lived but highly influential Gallery 32, an important venue for Black artists that opened in 1968 and showed the work of Emory Douglas, David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar, among others. Over the past fifty-plus years, Jackson has worked as a painter, dancer, teacher, curator, and theater designer. Beginning in the early 2010s, Jackson experimented with acrylic gel medium, a thickening agent, and later acrylic paint itself to create flexible surfaces on which to build multiple layers of paint. Jackson often augments and shapes these translucent supports with mesh or plastic netting from produce bags, as seen in Cut/Slip for Flowers. Repurposing is crucial to the artist’s practice, and she assimilates into her compositions found textural elements such as loquat seeds, beads, peanut shells, and even flakes of dried paint peeled off her own hands. Blurring the boundaries between media, these works are meant to be displayed, in her words, “suspended in space as sculpted paintings.”