Tomashi Jackson
Born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Los Angeles, Tomashi Jackson lives and works in New York and Cambridge, and was Visiting Lecturer on Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University in Spring 2021. Her work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and her practice brings together painting, printmaking, and archival research. As a student at Yale University, Jackson became intrigued by Josef Albers’s work on color perception, and found that the language Albers used in his writings on color theory echoed the language of educational policies, racial segregation, and civil rights court case transcripts. As she has said, “Color theory and human rights are conceptually interwoven in my paintings. … I find the language comparisons appropriate metaphors for a critique of racism rather than a critique of categories of race.” In this multimedia work, Jackson employs color and collage to investigate the value of human life in public space. The silkscreened documentary images and photographs are from her research into the history of transportation in the greater region of Atlanta, Georgia, and are based on ideas expressed in historian Kevin M. Kruse’s 2007 book White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.