Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Geraly Jackson, The Remedy of Color: Blue and Green, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Gerald Jackson. This show runs concurrently with Jackson’s exhibition, Psychic Rebuilding, at Parker Gallery and follows his recent exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux in 2022 and White Columns in 2021.
This exhibition highlights Gerald Jackson’s ongoing body of work exploring the metaphysical and visual power of blue and green. Embracing the colors’ associative potentials – sky, water, and earth – Jackson’s paintings aim to transcend the self and embrace our connection to the natural world. For Jackson, these two colors most successfully move beyond social constructs like race and class, to tap into a universal realm of human spirituality.
Jackson's paintings which are often executed on discarded materials from his neighborhood, also engage in a conscious dialogue with the history of American Abstraction. Vibrant juxtapositions of blue and green rectangles occasionally interrupted by thin vertical lines may evoke the “zips” of Barnett Newman or Rothko's emotional fields of color. Within the works selected for the exhibition, Jackson alternates between gestural swathes of acrylic on canvas and panel, and patchwork-like collage works on paper.
Jackson (b. 1936, Chicago) is a radical polymath, humanist, and visionary who embraces the spiritual dimensions of art to grapple with the cultural and social conditions of our time. Over the past sixty years -thirty years in Manhattan and the past two decades in Jersey City—Jackson has created a variegated body of work that includes painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, collage, clothing, performance, poetry, and music.
Jackson’s history was detailed in a 2012 interview with his friend, the artist Stanley Whitney, that was published as a part of BOMB magazine’s ongoing ‘Oral History Project’ which can be found on the publication’s website.
After a stint in the army in the early 1960s, Jackson relocated from his native Chicago to New York’s Lower East Side. It was there that he encountered and became a part of a community of vanguard artists and jazz musicians centered around the East Village jazz club, Slugs’ Saloon, that was active from the mid-1960s to 1972. After earlier studies at
Chicago’s School of the Art Institute and then later at The Brooklyn Museum School, Jackson started to exhibit his own work from the mid-1960s and was represented by New York’s Allan Stone Gallery from 1968 to 1990. He has exhibited at Strike Gallery, Rush Arts (curated by Jack Tilton), Gallery 128, Tribes, and Wilmer Jennings Gallery-Kenkeleba, among others.
Jackson’s work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including: Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1970); Black Artists: Two Generations, Newark Museum, Newark (1971); Jus Jass: Correlations of Painting and Afro-American Classical Music, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (1983); The Black and White Show, curated by Lorraine O’Grady, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (1983); Notation on Africanism, Archibald Arts, New York (1995); Something To Look Forward To, curated by Bill Hutson, Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, PA (2004), and Short Distance To Now – Paintings from New York 1967-1975, Galerie Thomas Flor, Dusseldorf, Germany (2007), among others. Jackson’s 1973 illustrated artist’s book of seventy-nine linoleum cuts Adventures in Ku-Ta-Ba Wa-Do is in the collection of both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Gerald Jackson lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.
This inaugural West Coast exhibition is presented in partnership with the artist Gerald Jackson and his manager Rai Alexandra (Studio@RaiAlexandra.com) – we thank them for their support and collaboration.