Installation view of Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe at Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA. Photograph by Mel Taing and image courtesy of the artist, Tilton Gallery, and Tufts University Art Galleries.
“What happened to me—me—a thousand years ago is happening to me now.”
Tomashi Jackson’s artworks unravel before your eyes the longer you look at them. At first glance, they may appear as abstract color field paintings, or reminiscent of Gee’s Bend quilts patching together textural strips. But upon more intentional gazing, images rendered in halftone lines come into focus. Jackson, born in Houston, Texas, emboldens the viewer to glean the canvas’ political messaging through extended looking, like an optical illusion—as one photograph reveals itself, you realize another is layered just beneath it, mingled together with crosshatching. Jackson’s colorful composites tackle some of the most dubious abuses in society, connecting modern woes to historic dispossessions through aesthetic storytelling. Prescient in Jackson’s work is a rigorous consideration of Black scholarship and activism; the imprint of generations of thinkers and artists, whether explicitly noted by the artist or implicitly imbued, courses through her oeuvre. This intentional interaction with theory and history situates her visual endeavors in this lexicon of Black cultural criticism and scholarship.
For each series, Jackson zeroes in on a community of color—most often located where her exhibition will go on view—to honor specific stories from its members about their unique, regional experiences with systemic oppressions: segregation, voter suppression, and land rights, for example. These inequities are most detrimental to low-income communities of color, stricken by food deserts, disproportionately impacted by environmental issues, and hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. To accomplish her messaging, her work recreates many of the aesthetic codes common in grassroots political ephemera and artwork. The fluorescent hues and halftone demarcations call to mind the visual language often utilized in batch-produced screen and risograph printed political artworks. Raised in Los Angeles, California, Jackson’s canvases also carry the imprint of the rich tradition of Chicanx muralism. With a strong influence from this West Coast wall art scene, she apprenticed with Juana Alicia and Susan Cervantes in San Francisco, adopting the visual language of resistance art to tell the stories of communities of color.
Tomashi Jackson, Minute By Minute (Juneteenth in Five Points Denver, CO 2023/ Leaves Study by my Mother in COVID Isolation in Bakersfield, CA 2020), 2023. Photograph by Mel Taing and image courtesy of the artist, Tilton Gallery, and Tufts University Art Galleries.
Jackson’s deployment of color in telling stories of disenfranchisement is incredibly deliberate. Her practice is shaped by artist Josef Albers’ influential Interaction of Color (1963), to which Jackson draws parallels to the civil rights scholarship of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.2 Jackson deploys Albers’ theory of “vibrating boundaries”—the idea that when paired alongside other hues, our perception of colors is fluid and varying—for a formal, artful use of color in her artworks, but also as a theoretical framework by which to understand their political messaging. Albers, a professor at the historic Black Mountain College in North Carolina, developed his color theory against the backdrop of social distress in the United States: de jure and de facto segregation nationwide. She draws parallels between Albers and Marshall’s assertions that color is changeable and contextual: for Albers, aesthetically, and for Marshall, socio-politically. “I doubt the lawyers and law students were aware of what Albers and his art students were doing, but the lawyers’ work was truly transforming public space,” Jackson said in 2019. “It could not have been lost on artists who were affected by the outcomes.”3
Engaging with a holistic consideration of history, Jackson’s own works often overlay images taken decades apart, hinting at the loop of intergenerational struggles. Late writer James Baldwin is famously adept at succinctly musing about these quandaries; in 1978, relating the police brutality he bore as a child to the enslavement of his ancestors, Baldwin declared: “What happened to me—me—a thousand years ago is happening to me now.”4 The invisible strings connecting historical cruelties, and between art and politics, to which Baldwin nods, eke their way onto Jackson’s canvases. Collaging ephemera, earthen materials like dirt from Underground Railroad sites, and rasterized images rendered on canvas and translucent PVC vinyl, Jackson assembles archival and contemporary materials as a statement about their interconnectivity.
Installation view of Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe at Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA. Photograph by Mel Taing and image courtesy of the artist, Tilton Gallery, and Tufts University Art Galleries.
In September 2020, months shy of Election Day, Jackson debuted five paintings at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, about Black voter disenfranchisement. The exhibition’s title, Love Rollercoaster, a nod to an Ohio Players funk hit, hints at the invective relationship of the US with its most marginalized citizens—more specifically, the suppression of Black voters through gerrymandering and other modes of disenfranchisement.5 Jackson showcases the tension of being a resident or citizen of a country that is systemically abusive to people of color, domestically and internationally. “Love Rollercoaster really encapsulated for me this up and down experience of hope and disappointment, of ambition, of exclusion, of, you know, striving to participate in the democratic process that is, you know, this, this storied noble American institution,” she told the MCA Denver in 2023. “But that is inherently based on disenfranchisement of Indigenous and Black people.”6
Engaging with a holistic consideration of history, Jackson’s own works often overlay images taken decades apart, hinting at the loop of intergenerational struggles.
On wooden frames sloping toward the visitor, she interposed a photograph of Black Ohioans on a voter registration line in 1948 with images of political and activist figures witnessing the signature of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1964, just a year before the act was signed, speaking to a crowd in Cleveland, Ohio, Malcolm X spoke on the insidiousness of the United States’ political machine, urging Black communities to wield their right to “the ballot or the bullet.” “The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education,” he said.7 Nearly six decades later, as Jackson crafts canvases about the prolonged suppression of the Black vote, these abuses remain rampant. Efforts of organizers like Stacy Abrams made a historic impact in aiding Black voters to register in spite of monumental roadblocks, much like Fannie Lou Hamer did in the 1960s onward.8 Late author Toni Morrison honored Hamer’s impact in 1998, saying on Charlie Rose, “I will not be turned away from any voting booth, and I vote regularly because of her.” The tension between the promise of American democracy versus its reality has been top of mind for Black thinkers like Morrison for centuries, and Jackson’s Love Rollercoaster conceptualizes its ongoing detriment.
Tomashi Jackson, Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir), 2023. Acrylic, Yule Quarry marble dust, and southern Colorado sand on paper bags, canvas, and textile with PVC marine vinyl, brass hooks and grommets on a handcrafted wood awning structure. 87 x 114 x 9 1/2 inches. Photograph by Mel Taing and image courtesy of the artist, Tilton Gallery, and Tufts University Art Galleries.
“Democracy is dead in the United States,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in The Nation 1956, in a missive asserting his choice not to cast a ballot. “Yet there is still nothing to replace real democracy.”9 In 1980, Baldwin wrote for the same publication:
My black vote, which has not yet purchased my autonomy, may yet, if I choose to use it, keep me out of the ballpark long enough to figure out some other move. […] My vote will probably not get me a job or a home or help me through school or prevent another Vietnam or a third World War, but it may keep me here long enough for me to see, and use, the turning of the tide–for the tide has got to turn.10
As we approach the 2024 election, under the shadow of Christian nationalism, genocide in Gaza, threats to reproductive healthcare access, and environmental catastrophe, this right to voluntary but unfettered franchise remains crucial.
In the days leading up to this year’s election, some of Jackson’s work tackling system disenfranchisement, along with others from her career in the past nine years, can once again be seen in Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe at the Tufts University Art Galleries in Medford, Massachusetts.11 Evidenced in the mid-career survey, the artist’s careful deployment of color, critical race theory, and community histories blurs and abstracts the lines between past, present, and future through formal and improvisational aesthetic means, supported by her thorough research and oral history practice. “A part of how I work using color to visualize narratives of public concern, attempting to collapse histories using archival photography and contemporary photography, breaking them down into half-tone lines, and creating visual circumstances in which they become collapsed,” said Jackson in 2019. “The histories literally collapse.”12 Jackson’s artworks are undergirded by a legacy of Black thought and artistry. Her rigorous research and visual practice draws influence from scholarly and activist luminaries, along with art historical and grassroots cues, to define a language of contemporary political consideration on the shoulders of the thinkers who have defined generations past.
Installation view of Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe at Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA. Photograph by Mel Taing and image courtesy of the artist, Tilton Gallery, and Tufts University Art Galleries.
[11] Across the Universe originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2023 and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia and Tufts University Art Galleries in 2024. It will reopen at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on May 30, 2025. “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe,” Tufts University Art Galleries https://artgalleries.tufts.edu/exhibitions/202-tomashi-jackson-across-the-universe.
[12] Whitney Museum of American Art, “Tomashi Jackson,” Audio, 1 minute 34 seconds, May 13, 2019, https://whitney.org/media/42390.
In the next feature release of Burnaway's year-long partnership with Oxford American, Sommer Browning interviews IBé Bulinda Crawley on her artist books and her founding of the IBé Arts Institute in Hopewell, Virginia.
Noah Simblist reviews the multitude of abstraction's meanings and uses in Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed, a Two-Person Exhibition Featuring Denzil Hurley and Reginald Sylvester II at CANADA, New York
Subscribe to BurnawaySign up to recieve the Burnaway newsletter and get notified about upcoming events and opportunities.* required field
