Tufts University Art Galleries: Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe: Exhibition Overview

Born in Houston in 1980 and raised in Los Angeles, Jackson builds textured surfaces from textiles, paper, site-specific earthen materials and ephemera, transformed historic images, painting, printmaking practices, and vinyl strips to visualize her observations of human experiences touched by legislative governance in the areas of education, transportation, housing, voting rights, law enforcement, livelihood migration, labor, and land rights. Her practice employs geometric abstraction, expressionism, and halftone lines that crosshatch and affect the viewer’s perception, illuminating the intersecting nature of the historic and contemporary events.

Jackson’s artworks are in numerous museum collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, MA, and New York City. In 2023, Jackson was the recipient of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s Rappaport Prize which honors local artists who have demonstrated significant creativity and vision.

Tomashi Jackson, The School House Rock (Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka) (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)), 2016. Mixed media on gauze. 102 1/2 x 114 x 32 3/4 inches. Collection of the Tilton Family.

​​​​​​​A large portion of Tomashi Jackson’s work builds on the history of school desegregation in the United States. Jackson writes in the catalog for her 2021 show at the Radcliffe Institute that this trajectory of “visualizing the history of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation and legislation became a focus for me after I watched a coalition of attorneys, educators, and advocates come together in 2014 to save what remained of yellow school bus service for Boston Public Schools (BPS) students.” The 2014 case about middle school busing came forty years after the 1974 decision to implement busing in Boston, which in turn was twenty years after the monumental Brown decision. The sources below examine how the attempts to desegregate, and the subsequent white flight, have had major impacts on the city as a whole.  

Tomashi Jackson, Alteronce in Hannah, 2014. C-Print. 36 x 26 7/8 inches. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery.

​​​​​​​Building on the work of her professor Dore Ashton on the political contexts of modern art, Jackson’s work explores the idea of “vibrating boundaries,” how colors change depending on the context in which they’re viewed, and the way that Josef Albers’s theory of color relates to the language of civil rights activism from the same moment. Dive deeper into Albers’s color theory, its implications in relation to race, and the half tone process Jackson uses to explore color. 

Image caption: Tomashi Jackson, Interstate Love Song (Friends of Clayton County Transit)(Pitts Road Station Opposition), 2018.  Mixed media. 40 1/4 x 111 1/2 x 42 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery. Photo: Wes Magyar.

Often incorporating local materials, including soil, wampum shells, and marble dust, into her work, Jackson dives deeply into issues of what it means to inhabit a particular place, particularly in the areas where she has been invited to create and exhibit her work. Use the sources below to explore those places, and some of the place-specific issues she researches. To explore how some of the histories that Jackson researches have impacted a sense of place in Boston, check out the Boston Busing and White Flight section of this guide.

Image caption: Tommy Tonight with Kaydott, Spread My Wings, 2019. Single channel video. Duration: 4:45 minutes. Videography: Aristides Logothetis and Nik Massey; Editor: Aryel René Jackson. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.

From old school funk songs to the smooth tones of 90’s R&B groups, which Jackson would sing along to on car rides with her mother growing up, Jackson’s works draw heavily from a deeply meaningful music archive.

Image caption: Tomashi Jackson, The Essence of Innocence: McKinney Upside Down, 2016. Mixed media on paper. 22 x 30 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery.

Many of Jackson’s works are inspired by issues of racial justice, whether through the histories of those who advocated for civil rights such as Thurgood Marshall, or through the cases of contemporary individuals whose lives have inspired modern movements such as Black Lives Matter and voting rights reform.

Jackson uses color to explore the creation and perception of boundaries. In what ways do we construct and understand boundaries such as those between neighborhoods or time periods?

Historical case studies and archival research fuel Jackson’s work, providing inspiration for artworks as well as visual material.

• How does this process create dialogue between past and present within one work or between several works in the same series?
• How do her works visualize ongoing structural and political inequities in this country? How do they materialize moments of racial violence that stem from the legacies of these inequities?

In what ways can history and policy impact a community’s sense of public space and place?

Jackson describes: “when I’m making sculpture, video, or fiber work, I think of those practices inside of the histories of painting and printmaking.” How do her works, in their materials and the methods in which they were made, respond to these histories?

In what ways does Jackson’s work create conversations between the art world and the civic sphere?

Music provides a major source of inspiration for Jackson. How are you “hearing” the music in her work? How does it “sound” in different pieces?