MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The first major museum retrospective dedicated to groundbreaking artist Suzanne Jackson opened at the Walker Art Center. Titled What Is Love, the exhibition traces Jackson’s 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. What Is Love marks the most comprehensive survey of her work to-date, featuring more than 50 works and reflecting six decades of artistic innovation.
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Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love
By Kellie Jones
Explore Suzanne Jackson’s visionary art through painting, poetry, abstraction, material experimentation, Black feminist creativity, and a life devoted to visual freedom.
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Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love will be on view at the Walker from May 14, through 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, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts. Following its upcoming run, it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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 first and foremost a painter. What Is Love follows her distinct painting practice, from her early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of paint to her three-dimensional paintings of the past 20 years. In these more recent works, paint is liberated from the canvas and built into luminous compositions grounded in a translucent acrylic base and suspended in midair. Through boundless experimentation with color, light, and materiality across time, Jackson explores the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love.
What Is Love unfolds in loose chronological order with sections dedicated to critical periods in the artist’s practice. Early in her career, in the 1960s and into the 1970s, Jackson developed a symbolic language, with figures drawn from her dreams, African cultures, and mysticism intertwined with animals, plants, and elements from nature. Treating acrylic like watercolor, she layered pools of pigment in “blooms and washes” to appear ephemeral and impart spiritual connections that expressed universal love and unity between humankind and the natural world. Lyrical and emotive, Jackson linked these works to her identity as a Black female artist, eschewing calls for her work to express her voice and lived experience in more explicit and direct ways. This vision is beautifully encapsulated in the monumental triptych In A Black Man’s Garden (1973), which made a powerful statement about Black beauty and love, with overlapping female forms in the rightmost panel expressing her interest in movement as a dancer and broader ideas of duality.
In the late 1980s, Jackson studied scenic design at Yale University’s School of Drama, and subsequently, spent time moving across the United States, working as a freelance set and costume designer. During this time, she began experimenting with scenic Bogus paper, a thick, soft paper used to cover the floor when painting theatrical sets. In 1996, when Jackson moved to Georgia to teach at the Savannah College of Art and Design, she noticed that the absorbent Bogus paper changed in the humid climate and began to explore the sculptural possibilities of the material. These experimentations would lay the foundation for the environmental abstractions—otherworldly paintings that suspend acrylic paint in midair—for which she has come to be known.
Throughout her career, Jackson has continuously pushed the limits of her forms and materials. In the early 2000s, her paintings moved beyond the wall and the canvas, becoming two-sided, three-dimensional layers of suspended acrylic, with surfaces often embedded with everyday materials and personal ephemera. Of this breakthrough, Jackson said, “I realized when I was able to suspend the paint in space that I had something that was really my own, that I was not copying or imitating anyone else.” Expressive titles give her abstract forms further meanings, as she dedicates works to historical figures, environmental concerns, and the people and things she loves. What Is Love features nearly a dozen of these captivating works, produced between 2003 and 2023, including Palimpsest Grit (2022–2023), which is in the collection of the Walker.
Of her work, and on the occasion of this exhibition, Jackson said, “For decades, my figurative forms and challenged shapes have pushed paint beyond the expected. With intentional reflective layers and floating luminous pigment, my work pursues alternative ways of seeing and interpreting spatial relationships of historical events, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and all global people, existing as “environmental abstractions” of our world.”
“Jackson has built an extraordinary practice over decades; one that joins formal rigor with sensuality, feeling, and fierce independence,” said Jasper. “What Is Love is an urgent and full account of an artist whose achievement has never fit neatly into the categories used to contain her. This exhibition makes clear that her work is not peripheral to the story of American art, but essential to it.”
Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis) has been included in a wide range of solo and survey exhibitions, including recently the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art (2024); Somethings in the World, Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan (2023); To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting, Gagosian (2023); Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present, Museum of Modern Art (2022); the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, Knoxville Museum of Art (2023); Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, Jepson Center/Telfair Museums (2019); and Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; California African American Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She is a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting (2024), Jacob Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters (2022), an Anonymous Was A Woman grant (2021), NYFA Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award (2020) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019). She lives and works in Savannah, Georgia.
