Biography
Suzanne Jackson was born in St. Louis in 1944, but grew up in the Yukon Territory of pre-statehood Alaska. With the encouragement of her parents, Jackson drew, wrote poetry, and danced. She went on to attend San Francisco State University, concentrating in both art and ballet, and receiving a BA in Painting 1966. At the school she was exposed to both traditional approaches to painting and to Bay Area painters such as Joan Brown and David Park. She also made large-scale sculptures, becoming aware of the work of Marisol and Lee Bontecou.
Following graduation, she toured South America with a modern dance company, and upon returning settled in Los Angeles. The first important works were large-scale paintings that adopted her earlier ink-wash technique to the new acrylic paints that were just being introduced. Her paintings featured both abstracted figures and symbolic images of hearts and birds. The work was seen in four solo shows in the 1970s at the Ankrum Gallery in Los Angeles, and in many museum exhibitions. In the early 1980s, a residency at the Idyllwild School near Los Angeles led to her living and teaching at the school for three years. The experience of living close to nature, as well as using found materials, proved to be formative influences that continue in her work.
In the late 1980s she studied scenic design at the Yale School of Drama, graduating with an MFA in 1990. Jackson designed costumes and stage sets for many dance and theater productions across the country, and taught scenography at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the mid-1990s. The theater work influenced her art both in terms of the construction of sets and garments, and by introducing Jackson to bogus paper, which she adapted for her paintings of layered and applied paper. The Indigenous Fragments series, begun in 2000 and the current paintings, use a variety of papers and canvas, pieced and layered with acrylic glazes to create nearly three-dimensional works. Jackson sees in these paintings sensitive visual experiences embodying both personal history and cultural heritage. She has referred to this work as paper-tapestries which respond to "memory-experiences" of childhood, social realities, music, and nature, as she observes it in her studio garden in Savannah, where she lives and works.
Jackson’s recent work includes vividly hued paintings combining both abstract and figurative elements, drawings on pieced paper, monoprints, and two-sided, free hanging paintings. She has received many grants, commissions, and her work is in public and private collections, including those of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Palm Desert Museum of Art. Jackson has shown her work extensively in the U.S. and internationally, and has been in exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute, the Joseph H. Hirschhorn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Internationale Biennale fur Bildende Kunst in Austria.
Jackson has published two volumes of her poetry and is a Professor of Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
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