On May 14, the Walker Art Center will open\u00a0Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,\u00a0the first major museum retrospective dedicated to\u00a0the work of\u00a0groundbreaking artist Suzanne Jackson.\u00a0The exhibition traces Jackson\u2019s lifelong devotion to beauty as a political force. She began showing her work in the late 1960s, an era when Black artists in the United States were often pressed to make figurative work with a clear political message. Jackson remained committed to paving her own unique path and to creating on her own terms, producing an extraordinary body of work characterized by abstraction, lyricism, and material experimentation.\u00a0What Is Love\u00a0marks\u00a0the most comprehensive survey of her work to-date, featuring more than 50 works and reflecting six decades of artistic innovation.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the center\u00a0of Jackson\u2019s practice is a dedication to both the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. Her joyful experimentations with\u00a0color, and materiality\u00a0refuse stereotypical notions of Blackness, insisting instead on complexity and tenderness. In her early figurative works, loose\u00a0washes of paint reveal\u00a0a reverence for memory and ancestral lineage. In later works, representational forms give way to\u00a0abstraction. Guided by the notion that beauty is an act of care and a means of survival, Jackson\u2019s work invites us to consider the very nature of love.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the course of her illustrious and multifaceted career, Jackson has been a dancer, poet, educator, gallerist, costume and set designer, and arts administrator, but she is\u00a0first and foremost\u00a0a painter.\u00a0What Is Love\u00a0follows\u00a0her distinct painting practice, from her early ethereal compositions on canvas\u00a0to her three-dimensional paintings of the past 20 years. In these more recent works, paint is liberated from the canvas and built into\u00a0luminous compositions\u202fgrounded in a translucent base\u00a0and\u202fsuspended in midair.\u202fAcross a career defined by innovations in material and form,\u00a0Jackson explores the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love\u00a0will be on view at the Walker from May 14\u00a0through August 23, 2026. It is co-organized by the Walker and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where it debuted in fall 2025. At the Walker, the exhibition is curated by Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Associate Curator, Visual Arts, with support provided by Laurel Rand-Lewis,\u00a0Curatorial\u00a0Fellow, Visual Arts. Following\u00a0the Walker presentation, the show\u00a0will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cJackson has built an extraordinary practice over decades; one that joins formal rigor with sensuality, feeling, and fierce independence,\u201d said Jasper. \u201cWhat Is Love\u00a0is an urgent and full account of an artist whose achievement has never fit neatly into the categories used to\u00a0contain\u00a0her. This exhibition makes clear that her work is not peripheral to the story of American art, but essential to it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Curatorial team:\u00a0Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;\u00a0Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White\u00a0Associate\u00a0Curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, Curatorial Assistant, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Laurel Rand\u2010Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love\u00a0is co-organized by the Walker Art Center,\u00a0Minneapolis,\u00a0and the San Francisco Museum of Modern\u00a0Art.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Support
Major support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Walker Art Center\u2019s presentation is made possible with lead support from the John Gabbert and the Room & Board Foundation Exhibition Fund. Major support is provided by the Pohlad\u00a0Family, and\u00a0John Taft and Laura Delaney Taft.\u00a0Additional\u00a0support is provided by Carlo Bronzini Vender, Deborah and John Christakos, and Susan and Rob White.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On May 14, the Walker Art Center will open\u00a0Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,\u00a0the first major museum retrospective dedicated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-413270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}