Cut / Slip for Flowers

While her diverse career defies easy categorization, Suzanne Jackson is renowned as the force behind Los Angeles’s short-lived but highly influential Gallery 32, an important venue for African American artists—showing the work of Betye Saar, Senga Nengudi, Emory Douglas, and David Hammons, among others— which she opened in 1968. Over the past fifty-plus years, Jackson has worked as a painter, dancer, teacher, curator, and theater designer. In the early 2010s, she discovered that she could create a flexible surface on which to paint by applying acrylic gel medium, a thickening agent, to a flat surface and allowing it to dry. Later experimentation revealed that acrylic paint on its own—applied directly to a plastic-covered surface and then peeled off—could yield the same result. Jackson augments these translucent sup- ports with multiple layers of paint and often shapes them with mesh or plastic netting from produce bags, as seen in Cut/Slip for Flowers. Repurposing is crucial to the artist’s practice, and she assimilates into her compositions found textural elements such as loquat seeds, beads, peanut shells, and even flakes of dried paint peeled off her own hands. Blurring the boundaries between media, these works are to be displayed, in her words, “suspended in space as sculpted paintings.”