Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Printmaking
Website: oliverleejackson.com
Oliver Lee Jackson was born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri. He earned a BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1958 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1963, after which he served in the U.S. Army. In St. Louis during the 1960s he taught at St. Louis Community College and Washington University, directed the youth-focused Program Uhuru at the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, and was closely associated with the Black Artists Group (BAG), an interdisciplinary collective of musicians, poets, dancers, and visual artists founded in 1968, forming a lasting friendship with saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill.
In 1971 Jackson moved to California to join the art faculty at California State University, Sacramento, where he developed curriculum for the Pan African Studies program and taught until his retirement in 2002. He has lived and worked in Oakland, California since the early 1980s. Over a career spanning more than five decades, his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints have been shown in over twenty solo exhibitions and collected by major American museums. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts painting fellowship (1980–81), a Yaddo residency and Nettie Marie Jones Fellowship (1984), a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (1993), the Flintridge Foundation Award for Painting and Sculpture (2003/2004), the Lee Krasner Award for lifetime achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Iowa (both 2023).
Jackson’s paintings are dense, large-scale compositions in which what he calls “paint people” — figures rendered through gesture rather than description — emerge from and dissolve back into vivid, abstract fields of color. In the 1970s he began working on canvases laid flat on the floor so he could approach a composition from every orientation, a method that still shapes the layered, multi-directional quality of his surfaces. His imagery draws simultaneously on European modernism, African aesthetics and cosmology (a synthesis he has termed the “African Continuum”), and the structures of jazz improvisation, informed by decades of friendship and collaboration with musicians including Hemphill, Marty Ehrlich, and Oliver Lake.
Beyond painting, Jackson works in drawing, printmaking, and sculpture in marble and painted steel, incorporating unconventional materials — chalk, duct tape, felt, jute, upholstery fabric — directly into his canvases. His early Sharpeville Series (1968–1977) responded to photographs of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, and since 2020 he has produced a body of monumental slotted-steel sculptures developed from maquettes first made in the 1990s.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.