Artist Suzanne Jackson is an alchemist who can make paint hold shapes in the air without the support of canvas or frame.
She can turn garbage into stained glass, shimmering silk and hammered precious metal dreamscapes. And she can divine love and beauty in situations of peril and grief, like the devastation of the environment and the loss of a grown child.
“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,” which opened at SFMOMA on Sept. 27 and runs through March 1 next year, is the first major museum retrospective of Jackson’s career, encompassing more than 80 works from the 1960s to the present.
The show’s title is a play on “What I Love,” a collection of poetry and art Jackson self-published in 1972. Her love for particular people, for the natural world, for humanity and beauty are perennial themes.
Curator Jenny Geith speaks of Jackson’s “persistent belief in the connection between all living things.” Yes, and her belief in the connections between the living and the dead, between dreams and the material world, between nature and humans and all of the stuff that humans bring into the world.
Geith and SFMOMA, in conjunction with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, have created a fitting showcase for a phenomenal artist.
Like SFMOMA’s recent Ruth Asawa retrospective, “What Is Love” places the artist’s work within the rich context of her life. While Jackson, 81, is not as well known locally as Asawa, her history in San Francisco includes most of the first eight years of her life, her high school and college years when her parents returned to the city after a spell working in the Alaska territory, and stretches of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
The scope, scale and excellence of this exhibition provide an apt partner to the Asawa show. As Asawa sought to liberate the line from the page in her wire sculptures, Jackson’s innovative suspended paintings free paint from the canvas and frame. Jackson’s work is very different from Asawa’s, but the audiences who flocked to SFMOMA in the spring and summer will find much to intrigue them through the fall and winter.
Jackson succeeded in making acrylic paint “stand up.” “The original way of describing acrylic is that it’s flat when it dries, and it dries in 20 minutes,” Jackson said during a walkthrough of the exhibition at the press preview. “So, I’ve been trying to escape the flatness of acrylic.”
She accomplishes this by painting layers of acrylic on a sheet of plastic, strengthening it with clear Nova Super Gel acrylic, and embedding mementos, found objects and detritus, including peanut shells, woodpecker feathers, packing netting, bits of textiles and even cat-shredded egg crates.
She peels the project off a plastic-covered table, suspends it and continues to work on it.
“Saudades” 2018-22, a trio of suspended paintings, honors the memories of Jackson’s parents, friends, her son Rafiki, who died from a heart attack at 45, and Lexi, the beloved cat he gave her.
At first, these pieces call to mind an atelier of lacy, bejeweled haute couture evening gowns on hangers or the flags of fantastical realms.
Jackson, a Yale-trained theatrical designer, makes all of her works alone and by hand and her impeccable command of drama, texture, light, shape and color are evident.
Two festooned wheels at the top of the largest piece are metal rims from the moving barrels her mother used to ship the family china during their western migrations.
Pieces of her son’s shirt and her father’s tie are set among a queen’s garden of hues. “Hers and His,” 2018, is based on the remnants of an unfinished family quilt. “Faith Ringgold said we have to finish our mothers’ quilts,” Jackson said, at the press preview.
She added a pair of “hers and his” pillowcases to the Dresden plate quilt pieces and other hand-sewn squares that her mother, who was a seamstress, left behind. In joining the work of her hands with the work of her mother’s hands, what was destined for a bed becomes a stained-glass window.
The more you look at her works, the more you see. This has been so throughout Jackson’s career. The paintings and drawings she made on paper and canvas in the 20th century are as layered with surprises as the suspended works.
Figures hover in space, or materialize in watery layers in many of the earlier paintings.
In the triptych “In a Black Man’s Garden” (1973), the man and two women, the bird and fish and plants all seem to be floating in some undiscovered, sun-flooded, white corner of the ocean. In other works, parts of humans and animals meld together or a face becomes a heart and a heart sprouts hands.
This show may be a treat for children young enough to be in the practice of looking deeply at picture books. They can delight in finding the birds, hearts, hands, fish and faces arising out of surprising places.
There is an incidental penis in “A Black Man’s Garden,” but nothing to disturb a kid (or parent) familiar with naked Mickey in Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.”
In the more recent suspended paintings, those earlier, morphing, floating figures mostly disappear. But it doesn’t matter, because the later works look like slices of dreams made tangible.
“What Is Love” culminates in “¿What Feeds Us?” 2024-25, a major installation commissioned by SFMOMA. Inspired by butterfly migratory patterns, Jackson spent two and a half years creating a multi-element sculptural meditation on the global effects of the climate crisis.
Dark greenish-blue gallery walls summon the deep sea. In one corner, a heavily textured, circular surface resembles a plane-landing level view of the Earth – brown and green and yellow regions with a slight strip of blue along an edge, dotted with a few tiny sparrows.
In another corner, there’s a greener but much smaller grassy ridge inhabited by two bigger blue-and-white birds and four sparrows.
After all the birds and fish and cats and flowers and people that populate the rest of Jackson’s work, those few birds might be the only living creatures depicted in this final gallery.
Several large masks hang high on the walls around the room. Built on big bullet-shaped forms, they recall the grave majesty of the giant oblong heads of the moai monoliths on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Except for a joined pair, sheathed in red coral and gold helmets and skirts, the masks stand alone, like sentinels or gods.
The central sculpture sits on an island of trash, like a giant cracked egg or a small, shattered ark, or even a split space capsule. It is covered in layers of moss and netting, stained fabric and something evoking the blackish-green sludge of compost soup.
Ferns are trapped in clear plastic webbing, the kind that can strangle small creatures. Each half of the riven shelter is blocked by stuff: Logs and bits of crap pressed into something soft that time has hardened into a shield.
Jazz by Henry Threadgill and Charles Lloyd emanates from the cavity. The trash bed this egg/ark/capsule has washed up on is dense with plastic bags, plastic yogurt cups, plastic lids, foil, glass bottles, plastic bottles. These containers carry the grime of the freshly discarded. The only thing missing is the stench.
“¿What Feeds Us?” doesn’t depict food or food production, but the aftermath of reckless human consumption. All that plastic, yes; what feeds us?
Even though acrylic gels and paints are central to Jackson’s art, she is an environmentalist who peels the synthetics off her hands and scrapes it off her tools to apply the gummy, leathery bits to other works.
The sculptural bricolage of ¿What Feeds Us? is a monument of loving attention to the consequences of human choices on this precious earth. Her eye is on the sparrows and the plastics.
