On the mind, nothing weighs more heavily than a lie. Conversely, in the heart, nothing ascends, moves or settles easier and sweeter than the truth.
“The African-American community informed me in its own particular way about love, friendship, harmony, human beings, aesthetics, etc.”
Thus speaks Oliver Lee Jackson, who has a made a life – a renowned and respected life; a deep, serious and influential way – by permanently doing what most adults consider child’s play.
He makes things. He works.
He is coming back to St. Louis Friday, Sept. 12 to open a major new show of his work as part of the Nu Art Series’ BAG and Beyond extravaganza, Sept. 12-14.
Now internationally known and shown, Jackson came out of a St. Louis art scene that produced, between 1955-1975, St. Louis American publisher Donald M. Suggs (a prime patron and supporter of the arts, and of Jackson specifically), Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Quincy Troupe, Shirley Le Flore, Eugene B. Redmond, Hamiet Bluiett, Michael Marshall, Michael Castro and many other accomplished and influential painters, musicians, poets and writers.
He has noted elsewhere that his working and personal relationship with Hemphill, who died in 1995, was, and still is, of great import to his creative life.
Jackson said, “I was fortunate to be intimate with musicians like Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake. Yes, from them you get imbued with this love of beauty. You learn to yield to beauty.”
Julius Hemphill died in 1995. Lake and Bluiett are very much alive and working, and both will perform as part of BAG and Beyond: Old and New Friends, to be held Sept. 12-14 at the Nu-Art Series’ Metropolitan Gallery
2936 Locust St.
The VIP champagne reception and exhibition opening for Jackson’s show will be start Friday, September 12 at 5 p.m., with doors opening to the public (no charge) at 6 p.m. For tickets to the VIP reception (at $20), call 314-535-6500. The show will remain up through Oct. 10.
That Saturday afternoon (3-7 p.m.), Freddie Washington headlines a program that also features Marlin Bonds, Mike Nelson, Eugene B. Redmond and myself.
Bluiett and Lake and a larger cast of musicians and poets (including Quincy Troupe) will perform a Sunday matinee, 3-7 p.m.
‘Necessity to make things’
Jackson is an American artist who has been at the center of personal, national and international creation for nearly five decades.
“I was making things all the time prior to grade school. When I was in my mid-20’s I understood my necessity to make things, regardless of profit or meaning. Making was not necessarily joyful; it was a burden at times, because it doesn’t yield to practicality outside of itself – in terms of whether one could make money or be successful – and the necessity to do often came when I wanted not to do,” Jackson said.
“After I finished graduate school, I couldn’t get a job in the visual arts. That was in the ‘50s. I worked in steel mills, factories, all kinds of jobs, along with other African-American men. Those jobs required intense physical labor. Then I was drafted into the army, and the army had little use for the visual arts. You feel out of place and useless.”
He turned the dry social lie of dead space, little support and negative time into the butter and cream of professor of Art at California State University, Sacramento (for 32 years, from 1971-2003).
His resume includes residencies at Harvard; the Art Institute of Chicago; University of California, Berkeley; the University of Iowa. He has shown and has works in the permanent collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and in many California museums: UC Berkeley Art Museum, Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in The Oakland Museum.
He has mastered painting, sculpture, mixed media, three-dimensional work, woodcuts and prints.
All of this molten energy has evolved out of a notion that I first heard fall from my grandmother’s lips when I was a baby. She would say someone’s “love is a rock.” By that she meant that they were heavy enough in their center, confident enough in their being, to stabilize themselves and the surrounding culture.
Here is Jackson remarking on the nature of family and sensibility: “How they handle joy, how they handle death. If you can draw on it, you can use it all. It does give you spiritual confidence about spiritual things. In other words, your rock is your authentic experiences, and not a dependence on experience explained to you from another paradigm.”
The material bases of his painting and sculpture can be found in his vast and profound knowledge of classical Western art, in his devotion to and understanding of Africa-American music, folklore, religious cadence – hearing him sermonize on the art of the Sunday sermon in a black church is to encounter performance art of a high order.
He also has a unique penetration and use of the overreaching public art of the tall tale of the black barbershop and the intimate stroke of communal genius that is everyone’s birthright: the sacred, the private, the subtle moments that make up the core of one’s inner life.
Jackson’s art has been described as abstract expressionist. In a recent exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum that included some of his work, I was struck by how categories, especially describing something as personal as the “makings” of any human being, literally diminish the work itself.
Jackson has the best take on all of these definitions: “Materials may have qualities and properties that you hadn’t experienced or anticipated. While you are pursuing a particular goal, the materials are making demands, and if you give in to the material demands, they will change the work.”
Two ideas hit me hard after viewing the show at the Art Museum. First, there was a certain feeling of being in the presence of monuments while viewing the work. By this I mean that even paper and canvas can carry the feeling of hugeness or great weight.
At the same time, the sense of motion was even stronger than that of weight. Contradictory phrases like “black light” and “living rock” come to mind. The strangeness of the work was elemental, in that something as heavy or even as dangerous as what the art portrayed was at the same time utterly seductive. The expression “let the rock fall on you” stayed with me.
“I intend the work to have power, and I want the power to be specific in terms of its effects,” Jackson said.
“It’s like being in a summer storm; it resonates you differently than a winter storm. They’re both powerful and they have powerful effects; however, a powerful effect is not necessarily disturbing in terms of violating anything, but the experience is able to fix you and resonate you and get your attention in a strong way.”
For tickets or more information about Bag and Beyond, call 314-535-6500.
