Alumna Tomashi Jackson (SMACT ’12) is profiled in the October/November 2020 issue of ArtForum.
From the article:
As a graduate student at Yale University in the mid-2010s, Tomashi Jackson had a striking realization: The essentialist language of Josef Albers’s pioneering instructional text Interaction of Color (1963) closely mirrored the rhetoric of the segregation policies fought by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in civil-rights court cases. The Houston-born artist has in turn developed her own language of abstract painting, one as rigorous in its inquiries into shape and hue as it is in uncovering legacies of systemic racism in the United States. Visitors to the 2019 Whitney Biennial may recall her contribution: dense architectural surfaces, hewn from found materials, that reveal histories of housing displacement and gentrification in New York by revisiting the largely untold story of Seneca Village, a free Black ninenteenth-century community that was razed by Irish and German immigrants to make way for present-day Central Park. Repeatedly, Jackson’s work visualizes how so-called progress is inextricably linked to violent systems of exclusion.
Read the full article by Amarie Gipson here.
