art.wikisort.org - Artist

Oliver Lee Jackson (born 1935)[1] is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker whose studio is in Oakland, California.[2]

Oliver Lee Jackson
Born	1935 (age 86–87) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Other names	Oliver Jackson
Education	Illinois Wesleyan University, University of Iowa
Occupation	Painter, printmaker, and sculptor
Website	www.oliverleejackson.com

Early life and education

Jackson was born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri, into an African American family.[3] After graduating from Vashon High School, Jackson attended Illinois Wesleyan University (B.F.A. 1958).[3][4] He served in the United States Army and was honorably discharged in 1961.[4][5] He attended graduate school in Fine Art at the University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1963).[3][4]

Teaching

In the mid-1960s to late-1970s, he taught art classes at St. Louis local universities and colleges and remained active in this local community.[6]

He taught at St. Louis Community College (1964 to 1967); Southern Illinois University (1967 to 1969); Washington University in St. Louis (1967 to 1969); and Oberlin College (1969 to 1970).[5] In 1971, he moved to California and joined the faculty at California State University, Sacramento, where he remained until 2002 as a professor in the Department of Art.[5] In the 1970s Jackson was one of the founders of the Pan African Studies program at the school.[5]

Art career

He was closely associated with the multidisciplinary arts collective Black Artists Group (BAG, 1968-72) in St. Louis through his friendship with BAG co-founder and director, the composer and saxophonist Julius Hemphill.[4] BAG was founded by musicians, theater artists, dancers and visual artists as a means for promoting creative expression among African American artists, as a center for arts education, and in order to have a greater place for the community in the city's cultural landscape.[6]

Jackson's paintings are tightly composed fields full of figural gestural references, that aim to transport the viewer to a place of personal experience.[7][8] His works reveal a mixture of cultural and artistic references and sources, from Western art forms to African creations.[9] Photographs of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 in South Africa inspired Jackson's Sharpeville Series of paintings and drawings (1968–1977), through his studies of the figural gestures of people caught in the violence.[10][8]

Jackson’s works are in the museum collections of the Museum of Modern Art;[11] the Metropolitan Museum of Art;[12] the Studio Museum in Harlem;[13] the National Gallery of Art;[14] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;[15] San Jose Museum of Art;[16] Seattle Art Museum and many others.[5]

Exhibitions

Solo

• 1979 – Oliver Jackson, Bixby Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington[9]
• 1993 – Oliver Jackson: Works on Paper, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California[17]
• 2019 – Oliver Lee Jackson: Recent Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.[4][18]
• 2021–2022 – Oliver Lee Jackson: ‘Any Eyes’, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California[2][19]
• 2021–2022 – Oliver Lee Jackson, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri[4][1]

Group

• 1976 – Other Sources: An American Essay, curated by Carlos Villa, including Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Rolando Castellón, Claude Clark, Robert Colescott, Frank Day, Rupert García, Mike Henderson, Oliver Jackson, Frank LaPena, Linda Lomahaftewa, George Longfish, Ralph Maradiaga, José Montoya, Manuel Neri, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Darryl Sapien, Raymond Saunders, James Hiroshi Suzuki, Horace Washington, Al Wong, René Yañez, Leo Valledor, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California[20]
• 1987 – The Ethnic Idea, curated by Andrée Maréchal-Workman, including Lauren Adams, Robert Colescott, Dewey Crumpler, Mildred Howard, Oliver Lee Jackson, Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Joe Sam, Elisabeth Zeilon, Tom Holland, Celeste Conner, Jean LaMarr, Sylvia Lark, Leta Ramos, Judy Foosaner, Joseph Goldyne, Belinda Chlouber, Carlos Villa, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California[21]
• 1994 – Continuing the Legacy of the Rockefeller Collection: Recent Acquisitions of 20th Century American Art, including Joan Brown, Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, Robert Arneson, Oliver Lee Jackson, Frank Lobdell, De Young Museum, San Francisco, California[22]

References

External links

• Oliver Lee Jackson papers, 1993-2016, from Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

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