The first major museum retrospective of the American artist surveys a practice spanning painting, poetry, performance and suspended acrylic structures at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Suzanne Jackson, Grandparents, 1970. Acrylic wash, gesso, and graphite on canvas, 116.3 x 81.3cm. Collection of Tina and Larry Jones, New York. Photo: David Kaminsky
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently presenting ‘Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love’, the first major museum retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the artist’s six-decade career. Organised in close collaboration with Jackson and co-organised with the Walker Art Centre, the exhibition brings together more than 80 paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present, tracing a practice defined by experimentation, ecological awareness, and a sustained commitment to community.
Born in St. Louis in 1944 and raised between Alaska and California, Jackson’s formative years unfolded within landscapes that would shape her lifelong attentiveness to environment and atmosphere. Her early encounters with San Francisco’s cultural life, including its museums and parks, established an expansive understanding of what art could be. Across painting, poetry, theatre, dance and design, she has consistently resisted disciplinary boundaries, treating artistic production as an interconnected field of gesture, movement and material inquiry.
Early painting and the poetics of translucency
The retrospective begins with Jackson’s paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s, in which she developed a distinctive approach to acrylic paint. Working with layered washes that retain the translucency of watercolour, she produced luminous compositions inhabited by hybrid figures, vegetal forms and symbolic motifs. These works are animated by an ecological sensitivity and a sense of spiritual continuity, situating the human figure within expansive, shifting environments.
During this period, Jackson also founded Gallery 32 in Los Angeles, an artist-run space that operated between 1968 and 1970. The gallery provided a platform for artists, including Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi, positioning Jackson not only as a painter but as a cultural organiser. Her commitment to community-building extended through her involvement in the 1972 Black Expo in San Francisco and later through public service on the California Arts Council. The retrospective situates these initiatives alongside her studio practice, underscoring the inseparability of artistic production and advocacy in her career.
From canvas to suspended acrylic
In the decades that followed, Jackson’s work underwent a significant material transformation. After earning an MFA in design from Yale University in 1990 and spending years working in theatre, she began experimenting with unconventional supports and processes. Scenic paper used in stage production became a new ground for painting, enabling a dialogue between surface and structure. These works often combine abstraction and figuration, incorporating textured materials and darker tonal registers that depart from the atmospheric lightness of her earlier canvases.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jackson began creating three-dimensional paintings in which acrylic paint was suspended in space without a traditional canvas support. In these works, paint becomes both medium and architecture. Sheets of acrylic cohere into hovering, lace-like structures embedded with found materials and fragments of personal ephemera. The result is neither painting nor sculpture in conventional terms, but a hybrid form that emphasises fragility, movement and permeability.
Works such as Crossing Ebenezer (2017) memorialise histories of racial violence through layered surfaces and suspended forms that evoke both wound and healing. In Hers and His (2018), materials drawn from the artist’s family archive, including pillowcases and quilt fragments, become integral to the composition. Through these gestures, biography and collective history intersect, and painting becomes a site for mourning, remembrance and care.
Ecology, migration and new commission
The exhibition culminates in ¿What Feeds Us? (2025), a large-scale commission created for SFMOMA. Integrating organic materials such as bark and moss alongside distressed plastics and found objects, the work reflects on the environmental crisis and global interdependence. Jackson’s background in stage design is evident in her use of “distressing” techniques, which weather and alter surfaces to suggest exposure and erosion. The installation reads as both landscape and aftermath, foregrounding the entanglement of ecological degradation and human migration.
Throughout the retrospective, themes of displacement and movement recur. Jackson’s own migrations across regions and disciplines mirror the mobility of her materials and forms. Paint migrates from surface to structure; domestic textiles migrate into sculptural space; personal memory migrates into shared historical reflection. The exhibition frames these transitions not as rupture, but as continuity shaped by adaptation and resilience.
‘Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love’ opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on 27 September 2025 and is on view until 1 March 2026. For more information, please visit SFMOMA.
