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Suzanne Jackson, 2019, Photograph by Tim Doyon, Courtesy Ortuzar Projects.
Between the Beats and the Hippies: Suzanne Jackson’s work within and beyond the context of Bay Area artistic movements
By Olivia Louise Marotte
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross
Like most retrospectives, What Is Love is curated chronologically. From the beginning of the exhibition, it is clear that Suzanne Jackson’s art was heavily influenced by place; What Is Love establishes San Francisco’s natural splendor and countercultural freedom as a critical foundation for Jackson’s artistic development. When Jackson was eight years old, her family moved from San Francisco to Fairbanks, Alaska, where she painted watercolor portraits of the natural environment from a young age. In high school, Jackson expanded her practice to include experimentation with oil paint. Colorful blooms and layered washes of paint–––characteristics associated with watercolor technique–––remained a prominent theme in Jackson’s work. However, instead of using watercolor, she used acrylic paint and gesso to achieve the supernatural, dreamlike auras in her works. That she was able to produce this effect without watercolor demonstrates Jackson’s command of the ethereal.
Suzanne Jackson chose to attend San Francisco State College (now University) in 1962, in part because of her fascination with beatnik culture. Just as the Beats sought to redefine literature amid Cold War anxieties and existentialism in the 1950s, Abstract Expressionists mirrored that creative ethos in their post-WWII art production. “First thought, best thought,” was prominent Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s motto, which aligned with the instinctive practice of Abstract Expressionism (sometimes called “action painting”). Post-WWII America saw a distinct rise in conservatism in which Senator Joseph McCarthy was a key player. In opposition to McCarthyistic “witch hunts” for communist sympathizers and a culture of paranoia, artists painted intuitively and immediately, rejecting the need for meaning in their expression. Abstract Expressionism solidified New York’s place as the center of the international modern art world with artists like Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock in the vanguard.
The practitioners of Abstract Expressionism would deny that there was any particular “goal” of their work, perhaps other than to reveal a latent, timeless, universal truth about the human condition. Visually, this manifested through paint splattering, color blocking, and the use of bold, often imperfect strokes and a rejection of recognizable figures. This blunt imperfection, as it were, was reflected simultaneously in Beatnik circles. Writer and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights's bookstore in San Francisco became a hub for these ideas. A college-aged Suzanne Jackson would frequent City Lights’ readings and community events in the 1960s, along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's, where she was first exposed to Rothko’s floating blocks of color. These early encounters with Abstract Expressionism's luminous color fields would prove formative; Jackson's later use of layered acrylic washes to create ethereal, suspended figures owes a clear debt to Rothko's atmospheric approach.
Exhibition announcement designed by Eileen Nelson for
Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,
Gallery 32, 1970; courtesy Suzanne Jackson and Ortuzar, New York
Abstract Expressionism made its way across the country to San Francisco. During the 1950s, it was the most popular style of American art, but a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area strayed from this movement to pursue figurative painting. This style, arguably the first to challenge New York’s aesthetic standard, became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. This wave of artistic production on the West Coast lasted over 20 years, including both the Beat and hippie movements. Jackson absorbed this regional tradition of returning the human form to abstraction's visual vocabulary, a synthesis that would become central to her practice.
Three artists are thought to have started the Bay Area Figurative Movement: David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. Each of them began as Abstract Expressionists and ignited a trend in figurative painting. Their works inspired subsequent generations of the movement, including artists such as Roland Peterson, who became renowned for his Picnic Series(1962-70), including his bright, geometric work of bold brushstrokes, April Picnic (1962). Jackson would study this lineage closely, adopting the movement's commitment to recognizable subject matter while developing her own approach to dissolving figures into washes of translucent color.
Suzanne Jackson, Wind and Water, 1975; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Michael S. Ovitz, Ronnie F. Heyman, and Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida
© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York; photo: Ruben Diaz
Peterson and his cohorts were part of what is understood as the “bridge generation” that would help develop a more formalized understanding of Bay Area Figuration into the 1960s and 1970s (which also included other mediums such as drawing and sculpture). Joan Brown, a prominent contributor to the second generation of the movement, studied under Elmer Bischoff. Like Bischoff’s, Brown's early works exhibited expressive, thick brushstrokes and vibrant domestic scenes such as Noel in the Kitchen, (ca.1964). However, Brown ultimately pursued her own unique style using personal experiences and spirituality as guides, along with the streets and landscapes of San Francisco. Jackson followed a parallel path: like Brown, she would channel personal narrative and spiritual themes into her figurative work, though Jackson's imagery drew more explicitly on nature and familial bonds. As the countercultural movement shifted into the hands of the hippies, Bay Area figurative artists embraced pop art techniques rather than resisting Abstract Expressionism.
What I find refreshing about Jackson’s work is that while it represents a confluence of formalist art trends in the Bay Area, her pieces are defined by a uniqueness of spirit and mystique. Jackson, also a dancer and theater actress, performed on tour through Latin America with Music Theater USA, after graduating from college. She returned in 1967 and attended the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, an anti-war and countercultural event that solidified San Francisco as the de facto capital of the hippie movement.
“I was in-between, not old enough to be a Beat and too old to be a hippie,” Jackson shared in an interview with the Brooklyn Rail recounting that time.
This sentiment helped me understand Suzanne Jackson’s negotiation between figurative and abstract works in the paintings she produced early in her career in San Francisco, and when she moved to Los Angeles in 1967, where she started Gallery 32, the first art gallery in the city founded by a Black woman. After a successful run at the gallery, she returned to San Francisco in 1970.
Suzanne Jackson, Grandparents, 1970; collection Tina and Larry Jones, New York;
© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York; photo: David Kaminsky
Grandparents (1970) well encapsulates some of the formal and thematic aspects of Jackson’s work that define this period of her career. Ethereal figures dominate the pictorial space, floating against a white––or in this case, beige––background. Jackson’s technique of layering washes of acrylic paint like watercolor is on full display. She creates dimension through this layering: the subjects’ facial features are accented by shadows which she creates by adding more paint instead of adding darker hues.
Jackson uses earth tones in the figures’ clothing, balancing warm tones in the male figure’s dress with cool tones upon the female. Two pairs of disembodied hands emerge from an opaque, richly red shape that resembles a root vegetable. Two yellow mustard plants (a symbol of rebirth) float in the frame, rootless, as if just recently picked from a meadow. The title of the work likely refers to Jackson’s forebears (possibly her own parents, who would soon become grandparents to her son, Rafiki, with whom she was pregnant at the time). Jackson’s fascination with the circle of life and harmony between nature and humanity is evident in Grandparents: the “family tree” is made literal as themes of growth and regeneration dominate her artistic interests and formal representation.
Jackson’s work in the 1960s and 1970s used a language of symbolism and indigenous ideology, a practice akin to that of the Abstract Expressionists. However, her approach was not intentionally “meaningless,” but rather exploratory: Jackson engages with reciprocal relationships between humans and the natural world. Within the context of the hippie movement, too, Jackson’s use of heart shapes and bright floral figures among human forms align with later iterations of Bay Area Figuration. If the Abstract Expressionists (and the Beats, whom Jackson admired) sought to establish an aesthetics of universal accessibility and rawness without recognizable form, and the Bay Area Figuration sought to depict recognizable scenes and figures with bold, bright gestures, Jackson’s oeuvre exists somewhere between or perhaps even beyond those realms.
Jackson's move to Savannah in 1996 to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design marked a profound shift in her practice. The first thing she planted in her new garden was a Cesar E. Chavez rose, a living symbol of California's labor struggles that she carried into the Deep South, where it would bloom alongside new histories she had yet to learn. The Southern landscape spoke to her in unexpected ways: in the lush, verdant moss, and and in the trees, she heard the voices of ancestors. Nature, her trusted guide since childhood, helped her find her way through Georgia's complex terrain. Visits to Sapelo Island and Wormsloe, rich landscapes teeming with connections to migrations and the slave trade, led Jackson to investigate her own history further. She would later dedicate artworks to these legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance.
Suzanne Jackson, A Hole in the Marker–Mary Turner 1918, 2020; the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection; © Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York photo: David Kaminsky;
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross
Among the most powerful of these works is A Hole in the Marker—Mary Turner 1918 (2020), a slender, nine-foot-high expanse of gold-hued lace and acrylic that hangs before us like a specter of history. The painting is a tribute to Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman lynched near Valdosta, Georgia, some one hundred years before. Turner was murdered for speaking out against her husband's own lynching. Jackson began this painting with the idea of a figure in mind, a departure for an artist who often arrives at subject matter through the process of making, but one which helps explain the work's overt verticality. The evocation of Turner came later, Jackson has said, only after she read about the desecrated historical marker on the site. A black ovoid at the top channels the emptiness of the violated female body, its womb-like presence a motif that has reappeared in Jackson's work over time.
If A Hole in the Marker memorializes a century-old atrocity, Saudades (2018–22) mourns losses far more intimate. Jackson made this work at a time of great personal grief, shortly following the deaths of her son, Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi, in November 2016, and many dear friends and acquaintances. The title comes from a song by Somi and Jeremy Pelt that Jackson discovered while listening to her Savannah radio station; saudades is a Portuguese term for a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for something or someone absent. "My mourning went into that," Jackson has said. "It's about a sense of a memory still present even if you cannot bring the thing itself back." One of her most deconstructed paintings, Saudades hangs at various levels, a concatenation of colliding shapes and ragged strips of dangling acrylic and gels, reminiscent of Al Loving's fabric pieces and the exuberant collages of the 1970s and 1980s. Into this elegiac work Jackson poured materials related to family: fabrics from her mother, who had been a fashion designer and quiltmaker; her father's tie; Rafiki's shirt; and the metal tops of the containers that brought the family's belongings across the country.
Both works demonstrate how Jackson's practice has expanded far beyond the ethereal figurative paintings of her early career. Where Grandparents floated its subjects against a soft, beige-toned background, these recent pieces occupy physical space with architectural heft—most are suspended from the ceiling and can be seen from all sides. Jackson's scenographic training gives the work an immersive quality; Entering, Departing, Leaving, Ascending—Luminous Souls (2018–19), for instance, functions as archway and transom, a passageway to enter or exit, in which human and insect bodies appear among the transparency of mesh. Yet the throughline remains: Jackson's fascination with the circle of life, with nature and humanity in reciprocal relation, and with the spiritual dimension of making. Georgia gave her a new vocabulary of loss, memory, and resistance, one she has transformed into some of the most ambitious work of her nearly six-decade career.
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross
The culminating work of the exhibition, ¿What Feeds Us? (2023–25), represents Jackson’s most recent and ambitious undertaking, created over a two-and-a-half-year period during which she became increasingly absorbed by the global environmental crisis. Housed in a deep blue room, the installation features mask-like figures assembled from African fabric scraps, Indian sari curtains, and Korean and Japanese papers that hang along the walls, evoking ancestral spirits and the migratory wings of butterflies that initially inspired Jackson’s research into metamorphosis. At the center of the installation sits a cocoon-like sculpture constructed from an extraordinary array of materials: paint peeled from her hands, debris from her studio floor, packaging egg-crate crumbles, wood logs, decorator’s moss, Styrofoam, and shredded mail. This central form is surrounded by distressed plastic trash intended to evoke ocean debris washing upon a structure of moss and wood—a poignant meditation on humanity’s environmental impact. Recordings by jazz musicians Charles Lloyd and Henry Threadgill emanate from the sculpture’s core, filling the space with what Jackson calls “African American Classical music” and underscoring the spiritual and cultural dimensions that have long animated her work.
Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross
Olivia Louise Marotte is a writer whose work centers on living artists and transnational modernism. A recent graduate of Swarthmore College, she wrote her thesis on Singaporean modern art after a semester of study in Singapore. She was a research assistant for Rosine 2.0, a socially engaged art project exploring harm reduction and healing in Philadelphia and has presented her work at national conferences. She currently lives in San Francisco, California.
Olivia Louise Marotte