Oliver L. Jackson didn’t seem particularly interested in the fact that his one-man show up now at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is his first solo exhibition in a St. Louis museum in more than 20 years.
“That’s not my choice, that’s up to them,” Jackson said from his home in Oakland. “They want a show now, they can get one. I’ve been around longer than 20 years … but if they want a show now, they’ve got one.”
Jackson was born in St. Louis in 1935 and taught college and university in the area 1964-1969 after completing an MFA at the University of Iowa. After a brief stint at Oberlin College, he taught more than 30 years at California State University before retiring in 2003. He has work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and many others.
Jackson’s last major exhibit in this city where his initial vision was formed was at the St. Louis Art Museum in 2008 as part of a small group show of African-American abstract expressionist artists that also included work by Michael Marshall, Phillip J. Hampton and John Rozelle.
The new show at the Contemporary, curated by Assistant Curator Kelly Shindler, features several of Jackson’s recent large-scale tapestries and monotypes in the museum’s Front Room. The work, recent (ca. 2005) rather than current, is archetypal Oliver Jackson: bold colors and dramatic forms that suggest figures and are potent in human feeling without being representational or narrative.
“It’s not like storytelling,” Jackson said when asked about the work. Talking about the work itself, once it is finished, held no interest for him. “There are not stories,” he said. “Each work is not about a story. It’s not an illustration of a story or an idea like that.”
Truly, Jackson’s work has to be confronted with the eye. It can be a total visual experience, but capturing that experience in words is difficult, perhaps even for Jackson himself.
Jackson did rise to the occasion of storytelling when asked about his formative years in St. Louis as a core member of the Black Artists Group in the late 1960s, working and living alongside the likes of composer Julius Hemphill.
“When you can get together as a group with people who are really sincere about what they are doing and be together for an extended period of time and exchange thoughts about what it is you are trying to conceive and develop within yourself, that’s unique, in my experience,” Jackson said of B.A.G. “It usually happens in a university, but then it’s very limited – that is a controlled program with its own point of view.”
Once Jackson had hit upon the subject of B.A.G., rather than being prodded to talk about his own existing work or the business that curators and agents are making of it, he really warmed to the conversation.
“When people who are adults, no longer students, who already understand artistic practice and are involved in it, can come together and exchange ideas freely, openly and in depth, and then perform and practice in collaboration in a manner where growth is possible, it’s just extraordinary,” he said.
“We were able to be together for what appeared, when we were there, to be a long period of time, but what was actually a very short period of time, and it helped develop me and whatever concepts I had so they were more sound, more clear, more rich.”
This intense working situation in St. Louis, he said, chartered his future course.
“We had high, high expectations and principles, and that was good, because in our failures we at least accomplished some things high-minded – and at a time when the community was under great stress and duress.”
Jackson, Hemphill, Lyle and their brothers and sisters developed these expectations and principles in St. Louis at a time when this city was much less accessible and livable for African Americans than it is today.
“This was during the so-called civil rights struggle, which was a struggle to survive as a human being, and an expansion of spirit required a full use of the city that was not permitted at that time,” Jackson said.
“So we took it on.”
Oliver L. Jackson’s solo show is up at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Ave., May 11 – June 10.
