A Lifetime of Layering: How Tomashi Jackson moves between history, place, and an ever-expanding practice

Sitting down with Tomashi Jackson in her studio in Somerville, I was looking up at the quadrant of ash, soil, and marble dust samples posted on her wall when she said, “I have these dreams. I have had these dreams since I was a very small child, and a lot of them have come true now.” Jackson has cultivated her own visual language combining painting, printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, fiberwork, and performance to alchemize her material layers into layers of time and space. The Cambridge-based artist has accomplished so much around the world throughout her career thus far, from artist residencies in Denver and Athens to exhibiting at the Whitney Biennial and publishing numerous books. “Across the Universe,” Jackson’s mid-career retrospective, is her first major show in Boston—on view at the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) through December 8. The exhibited works reveal Jackson’s scrupulous analysis of her subject matter and the materials used to portray it. That’s what those earth samples on the wall were about.

Across the studio from her samples of natural materials, and sandwiched between handwritten notes on the wall, Jackson projected archival images onto her canvases. The varied light created shadows and highlights, shifting all the painted colors and adding depth to textures—just one method of forming layers in her work. A medley of soul, R&B, and dance music played on her speaker. She spoke to me about her process: “There is time,” she said, “to explore, study, create, exhibit, and rest.” Jackson finds balance within these actions by allowing her goals to guide her and learning from all that piques her interest along the way. She is grounded in every phase and has embraced this cycle from the start.

As a teenager, Jackson left Los Angeles to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. Upon her arrival she was enchanted by the action taking place outside of school, from the abundant colorful murals to the social justice events incited by the city’s self-organizing communities. Eager to pursue art that shared this vibrance and rigor that she was not finding in art school, Jackson deferred during her first year.

But she was a dreamer with a plan. Jackson outlined goals that were characteristically unbound by discipline and material expectations, and indeed she accomplished all of them. She served as an apprentice to master muralists Juana Alicia, Susan Cervantes, and Emmanuel C. Montoya and participated in a two-woman show, “Soul on Rice,” at Togonon Gallery in San Francisco before moving back home to LA in 2001. There, Jackson completed her first mural, Evolution of a Community (2004), incorporating photographs of residents of the West Adams District where it was created, and met her longtime best friend, Nia Evans. Evans is now the director of the Boston Ujima Project, which organizes neighbors, workers, business owners, and investors to create a community-controlled economy in the Greater Boston area.

Jackson recollected sitting with Evans in Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’N Waffles in their twenties, drawing on napkins and thinking that they were talking about unrelated subjects of art and education. Jackson and Evans’s friendship is a remarkable paradigm of loving and supportive relationships between brilliant and ambitious women. Despite working in different fields, the two find important connections across their projects by way of Evans’s commitment to labor relations, education, and policy and Jackson’s insistence that we keep the history of all of those in focus through art as we consider our contemporary moment. In 2010, the two arrived on the East Coast.

During their early years in Boston, Jackson studied at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning while working as a nanny. Evans worked for the Boston NAACP and called Jackson in to document their joint effort with the Boston Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice. The 2014 coalition sought to prevent school bus services for middle schoolers in public schools from being defunded. Cloaked in her own prismatic handknit garments, Jackson dove in and embarked on an extensive study of school desegregation focusing on the work of Thurgood Marshall.

Later, while earning her MFA at Yale University, Jackson continued to study school desegregation using the university’s law library. It was during this time she happened upon Josef Albers’s seminal 1963 text Interaction of Color. Back in the studio, she chuckles, recognizing that all of her art teachers had been influenced by Albers before she studied him. Albers’s admonition that color is not static stuck with her. She was intrigued to find similarities across the language used to describe de jure segregation and color: Both Marshall and Albers recognized that color is relative and its perception is dependent upon the color nearest to it. As such, no color is absolute, and there is simply no grounds for segregation based on color. Across her oeuvre, multi-tonal acrylic threads, inks, and paint attest to the artist’s exploration of this truth; Jackson’s work routinely asks us to reconsider how we interpret color—in art and society.

Haunted by the nationally covered acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer in Florida, Jackson turned inward at the complexity of her position as a Black woman caregiver for white children in Cambridge while Black children across the river in Boston faced the precarity of their safe transportation to and from school. Her days were marked with tearful meditations on the lack of protection for Black children and all that is endured before adulthood sheerly because of the perceived color of our skin. She thought about how the world got to be this way and what contemporary audiences need to better understand it.

Resolved in eclecticism, and under the tutelage of artist Michael Queenland at Yale, Jackson developed a series of questions that guide her work: Can color be a vehicle of complex narrative? Can complex narrative be a vehicle for emotion? Can emotion be a vehicle for sound? Can sound be a vehicle for color?

When we met, Jackson drew a wheel on a sheet of paper and labeled each spoke with each of these questions to explain how one feeds into the next in a cyclical process. Light and the figure are at the center bore of this wheel. Jackson excels at open inquisitive thinking with signposts as she treads through her work. A 2016 trilogy of works now on view at TUAG encapsulates Jackson’s commitment to layering histories, mixed materials, and colors: Color Study in 3 Reds, 2 Blacks, 2 Greens; Dajerria All Alone (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (McKinney Pool Party); and Dajerria All Alone (Eric N. Mack).

Color Study might appear to be a tubular shawl or infinity scarf, but Jackson views it more like a painting. The piece uses multiple shades of the three colors associated with the Pan-Africanist triband: red, black, and green. As each color is added, all preceding colors shift. The different shades interrupt one another—a thin bright green line cuts into the black stripe at one edge while a more subtle earthy green passes through the other side of that green. Color Study is framed and folded such that its horizontal stripes intersect and overlay each other.

Located leftward on the same wall as Color Study, Dajerria All Alone (Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia)) (McKinney Pool Party) illustrates Jackson’s quintessential method of layering within her works. The piece hangs like a scroll from a wooden rod eight and a half feet high on the wall. Hot pink dominates and two blue rectangles reminiscent of swimming pools punctuate its first and third quarters, the lower of the two encased in a linear red border that is partially covered by rectangles of soil sourced from Texas. With this mixed-media work, Jackson highlights some of the challenges faced by Black children in the United States by merging two historical events: the Bolling v. Sharpe case of 1954 and the infamous McKinney pool party of 2015.

One of five cases combined in the Brown v. Board of Education fight for school desegregation, Bolling v. Sharpe was unique in that it was a federal fight. While the other four cases used the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants equal protection of the law to all people at the state level, fifteen-year-old Spottswood Bolling’s case in the District of Columbia required another approach. In 2015, a fifteen-year-old Black girl named Dajerria Becton attended a pool party to celebrate the end of the school year hosted at the home of two friends in McKinney, Texas. The police received calls that the party was rowdy and against the rules of the area’s homeowners association. Upon the arrival of the police, Becton was violently tackled and restrained by white police officer Eric Casebolt, who also raised his gun toward the partygoers.

Jackson recognizes that the triumphant desegregation of schools and deplorable police violence toward Black women and girls are interrelated. She layers both immaterial concepts of time and space and physical materials like paint, dirt, canvas, plastic, and wood in the work. Photographic image transfers of the events surrounding the two historical moments sourced from archives and media outlets are placed throughout Dajerria All Alone. These photographs usher real people into the abstract painting while the painting’s vibrant colors bring these people into the now. Jackson speaks to both physical and metaphorical baggage at the bottom of the work, where canvas pockets are filled with plastic bags—held over from her plastic waste studies in Belize—answering her question about a painting’s capacity to hold something.

Tethering these two artworks is a third, Dajerria All Alone (Eric N. Mack): a photograph of fellow artist Eric N. Mack wearing Color Study while posing before Dajerria All Alone. Jackson characterizes her work as being about “the perception of color and its influence on value in public space with emphasis on Black lives.” For Jackson, that Mack was the only person to ever wear and be photographed in Color Study before it was framed and made untouchable elevated its value. And this photograph of him wearing it refuses a facile interpretation of how color and value are intertwined. Overlaying a Black figure inside, yet emerging from, the knit color study with eyes open in front of a bold illustration of a deeply layered history of race, place, and color, Dajerria All Alone (Eric N. Mack) effectively marks what Jackson calls “a reclamation of existing narratives on color and value.” The work bridges Marshall’s and Albers’s conclusions, demanding that we see all of the nuance and myriad functions of color at once.

A couple of years later, when Jackson exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, she took a similar approach, delving into the history of the displacement of Black and Brown people in New York City. Jackson followed the city’s use of the Third Party Transfer Program to target homeowners of color with forced foreclosures. She scoured city archives to learn about the Black middle-class community of Seneca Village that was destroyed using eminent domain in order to create Central Park in 1857. In New Money (Mary had a plot of land & so did Ms. Marlene) (2019) Jackson partially eclipses halftone photographs of present-day homeowners and archival images of Seneca printed in eye-catching hues of orange and blue. Their placement and color signal a pattern of oppression and cue a sense of urgency to hold space for history as we consider present predicaments.

Later in 2019, Jackson attended a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, where she learned of the displacement of her own mother from LA to Bakersfield, California. She was brooding one evening when she realized there was a drag party planned for that night—a promising escape from her melancholy. It was there that Jackson emerged as her alter-ego, Tommy Tonight. He is the archetypal male R&B singer, ready to woo you with songs sung arms wide open while rocking a manicured goatee and sunglasses indoors. Music videos from Tommy’s group, D’TALENTZ, are showcased in “Across the Universe,” granting visitors fun and comforting respite of well-loved slow jams.

Along with her own musical stylings, Jackson’s retrospective emphasizes that music is embedded in her practice, as many of her works, as well as the exhibition itself, are named after songs she loves. The Doobie Brothers’ 1978 album Minute By Minute provides the title for Jackson’s public outdoor mural at Tufts. The piece combines the last photographs shot by her late mother—tree studies made during the COVID-19 pandemic—with images that Jackson took of folks rejoicing in big gatherings post-lockdown. These symbols of isolation and reunion are printed in halftone and crosshatched together to collapse time.

“Across the Universe” showcases Jackson’s career of layering material and narratives across painting, performance art, photography, social justice, and research. She is ecstatic about showing her work at home here in Boston and expressed deep gratitude for the people in the area—those who she loves, those who have made her work possible. As we wrapped up our afternoon together, she turned to me, a knowing look on her face, and said: “We started off talking about dreams and here we are inside of one.”