You have a rigorous research-based art practice. How did that begin?

The earliest works in the show begin in 2014 when I was a student, with explorations into employing research-based methodology. I’ve always been asking questions and trying to visualize language and relationships. At the time, I was experimenting with researching histories of American school desegregation. In particular, I was focused on the cases that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. As a student at Yale, I had access to the law library. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the many cases of this landmark legislation. Anyone who uses interstate travel, public education, or public broadcasting is a direct beneficiary of this legislative package.

I found myself with lots of questions about public-school transportation and a long legacy of devaluing the lives of children of color and public space, as well as defunding and depriving public schools of resources after the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. I had faith that if I focus on an area of research or a particular question that something is going to come of it. I didn’t know what the work was going to look like. I didn’t know what the solution was going to be. But I just started reading the cases.

How did you become interested in public spaces and resources?

I’m from Southern California. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was very impacted by the prominence of murals and narratives painted in public spaces. There’s this part of me that I can’t really shake: a desire to inquire about issues of public concern and embed them into a process by which new material is produced. The first works start there.

I was exploring the perception of color and its impact on the value of life in public space. As an adult, I was able to again study Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, which I had first learned in elementary school. This work gave me an opportunity to start exploring color relationships chromatically and societally. I realized that the impact of color perception and optical illusions initiated by interactions of particular colors which make us see things that aren’t really there. I saw an echo in the case law that I was reading.

Subsequent bodies of work follow this methodology, with site-specific research on such topics as the relationship between public transportation and voting referenda in Atlanta, for example, as well as a comparison between the contemporary use of third-party transfer programs seizing paid properties and the historic property dispossession of people of color in New York. Let’s talk about some of your latest works, which were produced during an artist residency in Boulder, Colorado.

There are three new pieces in the show that use marble dust from the nearby Yule Mountain Quarry, which produced the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and most—if not all—of the great monuments in Washington D.C.

Not unlike your earlier works, you employ a rigorous material process that alludes to the history of abolition and democracy in America. How do you create these multi-layered surfaces?

Before I know what the image is going to be, I’m building a surface with material that is symbolic to me of a place in some way. The material used for Here at the Western World…, for instance, is made of a quilting liner. I spent a lot of time in southern Colorado, outside Denver in the San Luis Valley, and I made friends with people who gave me such textiles. I attached the quilt liner to a piece of raw canvas. I used paper bags, which I separate from the handles. Over many days, I soaked the paper and unfolded it carefully, before laminating it into the surfaces of the work. The pieces become kind of like animal hides that are stretched onto the wall and cured in anticipation of stretching them onto awning style frames. The surface of the piece was then encrusted with sand from southern Colorado and marble dust from the Yule quarry.

There are additional layers and images constructed on top of that surface as well.

The halftone line image that’s projected on the surface in yellow hues is an image of a particular classroom from This Is Not Who We Are (2002), a documentary film about Black communal experiences in Boulder from the 1800s to more recent years. The catalyst of the film, which questions Boulder’s standing as what some have called the happiest place to live in the U.S., is a controversy over excessive police force used against a Black student at Naropa University in 2019. I included an image from the film of Professor Wyndham’s classroom.

Printed on the pink vinyl is a still that I created of a very quick moment from 1972 home video footage of the choir from the Second Baptist church—the only black congregation in Boulder for many years—singing, which resonated with my own experiences going to church growing up in Los Angeles. These places historically in the United States and other colonized countries are where people of color gather for respite and liberation. There are these moments that happen where people are trying to get closer to freedom by gathering together for release and for mutual exaltation.

That multi-part exhibition, “The Land Claim” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill (on view through November 7), features seven paintings, a vinyl window installation, an outdoor audio work, and archival materials. All of the work draws on extensive research by Jackson and her team, which included connecting with community members to conduct oral histories. As with her past work, Jackson’s latest paintings are layered compositions that feel at once abstract and figurative. Archival photographs painted in a bright halftones peek out behind vinyl panels printed with other images. The geometric effect is softened by Jackson’s incorporation of materials—paper bags, burlap sacks, soil, wampum dust, and more—into the canvases. 

These works grew out of a 2017 visit to the Hamptons with Parrish curator Corinne Erni, who told Jackson about something that is a regular occurrence for the area’s Latinx population: traffic stops. The community continues to be disproportionately targeted; a class action lawsuit in 2015 revealed that Latinos were also being robbed during these traffic stops. Because a significant portion of the population is undocumented, these stops often led to their being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

“People are getting disappeared, yet there’s no visual representation, no photos, no videos—just data,” Jackson told ARTnews in a recent phone interview. 

When Jackson accepted a residency at the Watermill Center, the legendary Hamptons arts space founded by Robert Wilson, she decided that she wanted to continue learning more about the lived realities of the Hamptons’s Black, Indigenous and Latinx community as a way to share their stories through her art. As an outsider, Jackson prioritized connecting with nine community members who introduced her to others. All the while, she conducted her own research.

“I come from working-class people, so I have the utmost respect for the people who make spaces work, both private and public spaces,” Jackson said. “I’m not from this place, so I knew that I had so much to learn. The research affords me an opportunity to ask questions because I know I don’t have the answers.”

In January 2020, Jackson set out to collect oral histories from the POC communities that would form the basis of an audio installation, titled Interviews. (Jackson was assisted in the oral histories by Martha Schnee, K. Anthony Jones, and Lauren Ruiz, and after the pandemic’s lockdowns began, the interviews shifted online.) Edited together by composer Michael J. Schumacher, Interviews echoes along the promenade alongside the Parrish, in which overlapping voices tell their stories of struggle and survival. 

Throughout the process, Jackson began to notice recurring themes in what her interviewees said. “You would think that these folks were sitting in a room together, talking,” Jackson said. “They each invited me to really see—that if people took the opportunity to look at the information, the history, the documents, it’s all there.”

Another major component of Jackson’s exhibition is its focus on Long Island’s Indigenous Shinnecock people, who have been fighting to regain stolen land for generations. Jackson teamed up with artist and researcher Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Indian Nation), who created an Instagram account (@onthissite) to highlight his ongoing research into the Hamptons’s Indigenous history. Scrolling through his account you might see a patch of marsh that used to be a cremation ground, a house that sits on land promised to an Indigenous family.

Dennis sees his collaboration with Jackson as an opportunity to create a space for educating people about the land that was taken from the Shinnecock. It’s an ongoing history: in July, Sugar Loaf Hill, a sacred burial site about a 15-minute drive from the Parrish, was bought back by the the Shinnecock Indian Nation.

“We live in such a segregated place,” Dennis said by email, “which makes these uncomfortable conversations—about who has the right to the land—difficult to have.”

Tomashi Jackson, Among Protectors (Hawthorne Road and the Pell Case), 2021

One of Jackson’s new paintings, Among Protectors (Hawthorne Road and the Pell Case), connects to this history. Created by layering halftone painted images on top of each other and interspersing them with colored vinyl panels, the painting recreates a photograph of Doreen Dennis-Arrindell (Jeremy Dennis’s aunt) standing in front of a bulldozer. She is protesting the beginning of a Hamptons development on sacred Shinnecock land in 1996. Another image visible is Among Protectors shows another activist Chenae Bullock leading a Shinnecock prayer service in 2020 at another construction site where the remains of what was most likely a member of the Shinnecock nation were discovered. To these layers, Jackson has added soil, dust from the studio of a Shinnecock wampum carver, and burlap potato sacks.

The other five paintings explore agriculture, immigrant families,  matriarchs, and two historically Black neighborhoods in the Hamptons, Azurest and Ninevah. In Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer), Jackson layers an archival photo of several Black men harvesting potatoes over a photo of a Shinnecock member holding a chicken of the woods mushroom that he has just foraged. Together Jackson juxtaposes two different approaches to getting food: the often exploitative labors of monocropping (the practice of unsustainably planting a single crop year after year) and the self-sufficiency of traditional food gathering.

There’s also another brutal history that Jackson learned about during her residency in the Hamptons. The owners of these potato farms had previously had a partnership with the local jail in Riverhead. Detainees there—many of them young Black men—who had been arrested for infractions like public intoxication were made to work in the potato fields as a form of prison labor. The practice lasted well into the 1970s. “The slightest infraction and you end up in some extreme situation,” Jackson said. 

A portion of “The Land Claim” is devoted to revealing Jackson’s research process for the exhibition. Notes and drawings cover one wall, while another holds the original archival photographs used in some of the works. Additionally, there are shelves of library books the team had checked out over the past year and a half, as well as binders full of news articles related to the Hamptons and the people of color who live there.

“There was a whole lot of planning and a whole lot of coordinating that had to that had to happen to make living here possible, that’s not lost on me,” Jackson said. “It takes so much for a person to be able to work where they live [out] here.”

Themes of voter disenfranchisement continue in “Love Rollercoaster,” an exhibition of five new paintings that opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, this past weekend. The state made headlines this summer for a new limit on ballot drop boxes—one location will be available to deposit ballots in each county—which had voting rights activists crying foul. “Love Rollercoaster” argues that this is no isolated incident, but the latest entry in a long history of voter suppression. Throughout, excerpts of conversations with members of Ohio’s Black communities are collaged with campaign materials.

Jackson will also be the focus of “Platforms,” at the Parrish Art Museum in New York, an annual exhibition series which invites an artist to activate the entire space for site-specific projects. The 2020 edition was scheduled to take place this summer and fall, but has been postponed to the summer of 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Jackson’s project, titled “The Land Claim,” centers the experiences of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families on the East End of Long Island in New York, many of whom are affected by intersecting issues of housing, transportation, and migration. The artist interviewed historians and community leaders from Organización Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island, the Eastville Community Historical Society of Sag Harbor, the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, and the Shinnecock Nation; transcripts of the interviews will be made available to the public. 

ARTnews spoke with the artist by email this past spring, as the public was first confronting the “new normal” of the coronavirus. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re coming off the Whitney Biennial into new representation, in addition to an invitation from the Watermill Center for a residency. How are you processing this stage of your career, which seems to be moving at an ever-accelerating speed?

I  feel fortunate to be a part of a gallery that has supported me over the last four years. Jack and Connie Tilton welcomed me to Tilton Gallery in New York City with my first solo show, “The Subliminal is Now,” in 2016. Things have been busy between making work for group and solo exhibitions and college-level facilitation at multiple East Coast schools. There’s been a lot of juggling going on that would not have been possible without the support from the Tilton Gallery team helping me to keep it all together.

Timing has been a project of its own. I’ve been in conversation with Davida Nemeroff and Night Gallery for a few years now after I had the opportunity to show with Rose Marcus at Mass MOCA in Susan Cross’s group exhibition “In the Abstract.” I got to finally work with them in Los Angeles for my first solo show at the gallery, “Forever My Lady,” that opened in mid January. I felt so looked after. I was able to assemble and construct the work that I began in June at a residency that traveled with me from Skowhegan in Madison, Maine to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the ICA at VCU in Richmond, Virginia, for “Great Force” curated by Amber Esseiva, to the ARCAthens Residency Program in Athens, Greece, before finally arriving in Los Angeles with my studio in a suit case and the work in rolls. Completing that body in Los Angeles required coordination and intuition within myself and with a number of other extraordinary people in different locations (carpenter Ruben Palenicia, video editor Ariel Jackson, painter Anna Rosen, and Jose Alvarez at Duggal Visual Solutions in New York). I could call anyone from either gallery when I needed help. It worked like a good song. The timing and Energy was right. It had to be for everything to come together. Under the most absurd circumstances, limits on time, and demands of labor and emotions, we remained in tune with each other. 

How has the health crisis affected your plans?

The global public health crisis has changed a lot of things for everyone everywhere. I’ve been sheltering in place in Massachusetts since March and I’ve remained in meaningful communication with the amazing people at both Tilton Gallery and Night Gallery. The good vibrations and seriousness about stewarding my work in this world are so powerful for me right now [and] keeping me encouraged right now. They understand me. So entering the new representation relationship just feels like the continuation of something that makes sense. So much is difficult to make sense of right now, but my work isn’t one of those things because of the communities that I get to be a part of across the country.

You make works that confront living histories of racial injustice. Where do you begin when you’re setting out to document these moments with art? 

When I am starting a process for a specific history of a place or event, I go to that place if I can. I search my feelings and observe the current state of that world. I tend to wonder where the present converges with the past; where there are patterns in experiences of public space. I understand public space to be both physical and historic; implicating many people. Issues of governance, policy, and law are such realms that touch us even when some of us can’t feel their presence. I look for the people that I can ask questions about whatever it is I am sensing as links from the present to the past. Every interactive step tells me what to do next in seeking out archival materials to help me visualize the stories in collision.

Tomashi Jackson, ‘Ecology of Fear (Abrams for Governor of Georgia) (Negro Women wait to congratulate LBJ),’ 2020.

Can you tell me some about the works shown in a group exhibition at Night Gallery this past summer?

Temple for Bakari (Shady Grove Church Bombing) is an ode to Bakari Henderson who was beaten to death on a busy street on the Greek island of Zakynthos in 2017 by a group of Serbian men. They had been angered that he took a selfie with a Serbian woman bartender. He was chased from the bar into the street and cornered between parked cars. No one intervened to help him. All of it was captured on closed circuit security cameras. They were cleared of his murder. In the piece, he and his parents are painted into a surface coated with Pentelic marble, the only marble used to restore the ancient monuments of the Acropolis. One of his celebratory graduation photos intersects with a picture of his parents after the court’s verdict of assault instead of murder was announced. Before his death he’d told his mother that given the state of race and racism in the United States, he felt safer in Greece. Bakari was from Texas. 

This piece is special for a number of reasons, one being that I made it after “Forever My Lady” opened at Night Gallery. I stayed in the studio and kept working until I had to pack up and fly back to the East Coast. It was mounted on its stretcher and installed in the gallery after I left town. Making it taught me a lot. After spending six weeks in Athens, I felt like I had to make a work dedicated to Bakari, I just had to. It turned out to be incredibly beautiful, it sparkles. It holds something that I learned from every work I made from the Biennial until that moment, which were hard and sometimes painful processes. 

Do you have a sense of what a finished work will look like when you start developing a new idea?

I don’t always know what the outcome is supposed to be and I try to leave room for those resolutions of discipline to reveal themselves. Will drawing or printmaking or moving images or sculpture enter and make sense of things? What collaborations with other disciplines of the Conservatory might answer open questions of accessibility and vehicles for emotion? I grew up in California, and I understood painting through murals first. I had a lot of charged questions about the nature of public space and narratives of the People. Digging with intention into research driven work and having a best friend whose work is in education and economic policy, I understand public space in more expansive ways now. I believe in the Plastic Arts, the Performing Arts, and the Humanities. All of this helps me to see, listen, interpret, and produce work and facilitation that feels right. I can’t do it if it doesn’t feel right.

Installation view of archive room in “CCA Lagos at ISCP: Orí méta odún méta ibìkan,” 2017.

MARTIN PARSEKIAN

TUESDAY, JUNE 6

Panel: “Panel Discussion on CCA Lagos” at International Studio & Curatorial Program
For its annual institution-in-residence program, the International Studio & Curatorial Program invited the Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos in Nigeria to show work in Brooklyn. On view there now is “CCA Lagos at ISCP,” a show based on an exhibition held last year at the Nigerian nonprofit called “Orí méta odún méta ibìkan.” With that show in mind, artists ruby onyinyechi amanze, Simone Leigh, and Pinar Yolacan will convene to discuss their past projects for CCA Lagos and what the space has done for the Nigerian art scene. Artist and curator Jude Anogwih will moderate the panel.
International Studio & Curatorial Program, 1040 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, 6:30–8 p.m.

Satoshi Kojima, Candy and Whips, 2015, oil on canvas.

©SATOSHI KOJIMA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND BRIDGET DONAHUE, NYC

Opening: Satoshi Kojima at Bridget Donahue
Not to be confused with the Japanese professional wrestler of the same name, Satoshi Kojima paints scenes that feel cloistered, as if they took place in rooms set off from the real world. They’re typically rendered in light pastels and often involve surreal combinations of people and objects. In one of Kojima’s paintings, a stiletto-wearing foot pokes out of a tub while a man reclines nearby, all of which happens in striped room. With this show, organized with Tramps gallery, the Düsseldorf-based artist will debut new and recent paintings.
Bridget Donahue, 99 Bowery, 2nd Floor, 6–8 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7

Talk: Colm Tóibín at Paula Cooper Gallery
At this talk, organized by 192 Books, Colm Tóibín will discuss his recent book House of Names, a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon. In Tóibín’s book, Clytemnestra’s story is expanded to include the perspectives of three other characters from Greek mythology: Orestes, Aegisthus, and Electra. By the end of the book, Agamemnon will be murdered by Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover. In response, Orestes, her son, and Electra, her daughter, will plot their own form of revenge for Clytemnestra’s deception and rage. Tóibín, who hails from Ireland, will be on hand to talk about the novel.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, 7 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 8

Opening: Trudy Benson and Yann Gerstberger at Lyles & King
This two-person show, titled “TT52,” brings together work by a pair of painters whose densely layered abstractions recall either computer-based abstraction or vernacular imagery. Trudy Benson, the better-known of the two, creates handmade canvases that look as if they were made by a computer. With forms that resemble images cut up and edited in Photoshop, and with imperfect lines that are clearly the work of a human, Benson’s work ponders the transition from analog to digital. Yann Gerstberger, who is based in Mexico City, crafts textiles that rely on a combination of ready-made and original materials, and typically incorporate stylized images of humans and animals that allude to Mexican modernism.
Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth Street, 6–8 p.m.

Ceal Floyer, Plughole (still), 2017, video projection with sound.

©CEAL FLOYER/COURTESY 303 GALLERY, NEW YORK

Opening: Ceal Floyer at 303 Gallery
Much of Ceal Floyer’s plainspoken work makes the familiar unfamiliar—everyday items suddenly appear strange in the Berlin-based artist’s hands. Off-putting and typically devoid of color, Floyer’s videos and assisted readymades ponder when an object becomes dysfunctional. With her latest show at 303 Gallery, Floyer will continue exploring the contradictions in the most quotidian of things, among them drains. Her 2017 video Plughole features a single shot of a sink drain with water pouring into it until it fills and simply fails to do what it’s meant to do. Also on view will be new sculptures, one of which features little black blocks that feel as if they could collapse at any moment.
303 Gallery, 555 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.

Alexander Calder, Object with Red Discs, 1931, painted steel rod, wire, wood and sheet aluminum.

JERRY L. THOMPSON/©2017 CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK

Opening: Susan Weil at Sundaram Tagore Gallery
Currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s Robert Rauschenberg retrospective are a series of blue monoprints featuring various ghostly objects that appear as if they were burned into paper. Any Rauschenberg completist knows that the Neo-Dadaist wasn’t working alone when he made these—he was collaborating with his then-wife, Susan Weil, who is a significant artist in her own right. With this exhibition, Weil will show new works that mess with viewers’ sense of perspective. Among the new pieces will be Spiral History of Art with Hand: Cave Painting to Now (2016), a circular print that arranges details from works depicting hands by Sandro Botticelli, Roy Lichtenstein, and more.
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 9

Opening: “Calder: Hypermobility” at Whitney Museum
Alexander Calder’s mobile sculptures were never meant to sit still. “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions,” Calder once said. Pushing modernist painting’s form beyond the canvas, Calder’s spare mobiles anticipated a generation of performance artists who would turn their attention to bodily movement. This show surveys Calder’s fascination with kinetic objects, with a focus on sounds and the passage of time. Contemporary artists will contribute new works in response to Calder’s pieces, and the works will be activated frequently over the course of the show’s run. The exhibition is the final show at the Whitney for curator Jay Sanders, who has already begun a new term as executive director and chief curator at Artists Space.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Screening: Crooklyn at Metrograph
Crooklyn surprised critics in 1994 because it was, ironically, less shocking than past efforts by Spike Lee, whose movies include Do the Right Thing (1989) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986). An semi-autobiographical story about a girl living in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Crooklyn is Lee at his most tender and most restrained, though it’s not without a sense for the sociopolitical factors that guide his characters’ lives. Shown here as part of a series about films set in Bed-Stuy, this screening will be introduced by Brandon Harris, who, after the screening, will sign copies of his new book, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $15

Still from Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994).

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

SATURDAY, JUNE 10

Talk: Tomashi Jackson and Jennifer Packer at Brooklyn Museum
This talk brings together two painters whose work explores what art history leaves out, specifically when it comes to identity. Tomashi Jackson’s painterly collages meditate on how color theory was ironically color-blind—it was created by white men, for white men. Jackson then combines process-based abstraction with references to past historical events that involved racism. Jennifer Packer, on the other hand, is a figurative painter whose portraits depict black sitters, usually in positions that look intentionally somewhat awkward. Here, the two painters will address the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.”
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 2–3 p.m.