OLIVER LEE JACKSON

Life

Oliver Lee Jackson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1935. He received his BFA from Wesleyan University, Illinois, in 1958 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1963. In the 1960s, Jackson was involved with several community cultural projects in St. Louis, including the People’s Art Center and Program Uhuru. He also worked with the Black Artists Group, a multidisciplinary artist collective founded by musicians, artists, dancers, and poets.

Jackson relocated to California and taught at the California State University in Sacramento between 1971 to 2002, where he developed a curriculum for the Pan African Studies programme.

Jackson is a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Award in Painting and Sculpture from Flintridge Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2023, he received the Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

Oliver Lee Jackson Artworks

Throughout the breadth of his practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, and printmaking, he has explored the fluidity of form and gesture, specifically speaking through a position of fluidity over fixed interpretations. Combining both the figurative and abstract, Jackson often works in an improvisational manner that can be likened to visual translations of jazz.

Silhouettes and forms alluding to the human figure make frequent appearances in Jackson’s work. These figures can be seen in works like Painting (12.15.04) (2004), in which orange line work evokes people viewed from above surrounded by colourful swaths of oil paint. Jackson has also employed colour blocking, as seen in Triptych (3.20.15, 5.21.15, 6.8.15) (2015), to create contours of the human form layered atop each other in various hues. Sometimes shrouded behind frenetic strokes or simplified in form, Jackson’s use of the motif is a ’jumping off point’ for his work that invokes a certain sensuality to draw the viewer in.

‘Sharpeville’ (1969–73) series

While Jackson’s work is often ambiguous in its political inclination and narratives, his ‘Sharpeville’ (1969–73) series marks a brief yet potent stylistic change in his oeuvre. Referencing photographs of anti-apartheid activists fleeing the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in Johannesburg, Jackson’s restrained paintings amalgamate elements of the original photographs onto one another over a grid. Sharpeville Series I (1970) depicts a 6x6 grid: the bottom left holds a bright red, L-shaped mark while the top right edge shows small hands holding a blanket and what appears to be a childlike face.

Exhibitions

Oliver Lee Jackson has held solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California, among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Arkansas; Songwon Art Center, Seoul; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; and M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Jackson’s work has been collected by institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston.

Website

Oliver Lee Jackson’s website can be found here.

Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2024