Suzanne Jackson ‘Holding on to a Sound’

In 1968, Suzanne Jackson opened Gallery 32 in her studio in the Granada Buildings on Lafayette Park Place. At the time, Jackson was a student of Charles White at the Otis Art Institute around the corner, and Gallery 32 was host to a number of ground-breaking exhibitions with a community of young, socially minded and politically active artists in Los Angeles.
50 years later, O-Town House is pleased to present Jackson’s return to the Granada Buildings with the exhibition, holding on to a sound, showing recent works from a wide-reaching career that spans over five decades——alongside her visual art practice, Jackson has worked in the fields of dance, theater and costume design, poetry, and social activism.
The exhibition, holding on to a sound, features paintings that vacillate mysteriously between formal and figurative explorations of both abstracted vernacular and immediate personal narratives. Jackson’s paintings are at once lyrical and surreal while majestically insistent in their material presence.
Alongside these nuanced and complex works, the O-Town House exhibition will showcase a selection of ephemera from the Gallery 32 archives compiled together with Rachel Reese of the Telfair Museums in Savannah.

Suzanne Jackson was born in St. Louis and grew up in San Francisco and then pre-statehood Alaska before moving back to study in San Francisco and then Los Angeles. Since 1996, Jackson has lived and worked as an artist and an educator in Savannah, Georgia. Her work is currently featured in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power opening at The Broad this March, in the exhibition West by Midwest at MCA Chicago, and the forthcoming Life Model: Charles White and his Students at LACMA. The Telfair Museums / Jepson Center for the Arts will be premiering the first full-career retrospective exhibition Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades in June of this year.