Blessed Be the Rock (1920s Dearfield Group, 1970s Ruth Flowers in The Little Rectangle, & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir),” 2023. (Photo courtesy of Tilton Gallery)
Tomashi Jackson: Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture
Tomashi Jackson will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson combines practices of painting, printmaking, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure policy. The work interrogates intersections between formal languages of visual art and political languages driving histories of segregation, voting rights, education, transportation, labor, and housing in the United States. Considering color as both chromatic and social, Jackson’s work embraces compositional abstraction to investigate the interaction of color and its impact on the perceived value of human life in public space.
Jackson’s solo museum exhibitions include “Across the Universe,” organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Tufts University Art Galleries in Medford, Penn., and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; “SLOW JAMZ” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, N.Y.; “The Land Claim” at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.; and “Love Rollercoaster” at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others.
Her work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in group exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum, Atlanta; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She is the recipient of the 2023 Rappaport Prize, the 2022 Roy R. Neuberger Prize, and the 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Her work is included in many public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland; and the Tufts University Art Galleries. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work is exhibited and represented by the Tilton Gallery, New York City; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 11 at 5:30pm • Kemper Art Museum
Roots and Rhizomes: Relational Networks in the Art of Carolina Caycedo
In 2022, Carolina Caycedo stewarded the planting of an indigenous shadbush tree in a community garden in New York City’s East Harlem (El Barrio). This living organism, whose metaphorical seeds grew from Caycedo’s ongoing “Genealogy of Struggle” series, inspires Susanna V. Temkin’s exploration of the artist’s work within larger relational networks. Expanding ecological and symbolic concepts associated with roots, seeds, and branches, Temkin considers connections within Caycedo’s practice and across broader art histories of the Americas. In particular, Temkin will address connections to other artists in Caycedo’s work, along with broader histories of protest, ecofeminism, solidarity, and resistance.
This talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Carolina Caycedo: Growing Deep Roots”, as well as the forthcoming presentation of Confluencias at El Museo del Barrio, New York (originated at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo).
About the Speaker
Susanna V. Temkin is an art historian and the interim chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she has worked since 2018. Temkin earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research focused on modern art in the Americas, with a concentration on Cuba. At El Museo, her curatorial credits include the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, "Culture and the People" (2019), “La Trienal” (2020, 2024, and forthcoming 2027 edition), and the recent monograph of photographer Sophie Rivera (2026), among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as assistant curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin contributed essays to several exhibition catalogues and publications and is currently serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.