Tomashi Jackson: A Houston Homecoming
Tomashi Jackson, I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop), 2022. Acrylic, Yule Quarry marble dust, and paper bags on canvas with PVC marine vinyl mounted on a handcrafted wood awning structure with brass hooks and grommets. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery.
In her ambitious mid-career survey—originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and opening soon at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on May 30th—Tomashi Jackson brings together over a decade of research-driven work that examines the entangled histories of race, public policy, education, labor, geography, and belonging in the United States. Jackson's practice is based on the spirit of inquiry, curiosity, and radical care, spanning a diverse range of media such as painting, printmaking, video, photography, fiber, and sculpture. In an interview with Xuezhu Jenny Wang, Jackson discusses her deep engagement with historical archives, the sense of place in the chronology of her work, and the enduring urgency of visualizing histories of exclusion, resistance, and human connection through color and material.
Xuezhu Jenny Wang: Can you tell me more about how this mid-career survey came about? What were some of the core themes and thought processes behind the show's development?
Tomashi Jackson: The show originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and was curated by Miranda Lash, the Ellen Bruss Senior Curator. We developed it over several years. It’s organized chronologically, starting with my early work from 2014 and moving up to 2023, including new paintings and videos based on my research into Black life in and around Denver and Boulder—how people have created spaces for congregation, worship, recreation, and self-development in historically hostile environments.
I spent the summer of 2022 in Colorado as a guest of the Swoon Art House in partnership with MCA Denver. That residency allowed me to explore southern Colorado. Miranda took me into the mountains, into a silver mine, and, very importantly, to the Yule Marble Quarry, where the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and other major monuments in DC was sourced in the 1800s. We met the workers there—the quarry is currently operated by the R.E.D. Graniti Company—and they generously sent me home with buckets of marble dust, which I use in making my painting surfaces. So the newer works about Colorado are literally embedded with local materials like stone dust.
Tomashi Jackson, Guns and Butter (Nia in the Morehouse Creed), 2022. C-print mounted on Sintra. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery.
XJW: As the show travels to Texas, will there be new work responding specifically to Texas, or is it largely the same body of work from Denver?
TJ: The core of the show starts with work from 2014, and when it opened, the most recent pieces were from 2022. But since then, new works have been added—like a live one-night-only performance I did at my gallery in Los Angeles.
As for Texas—yes, elements of that place have been part of my work for a long time. When I was a student studying painting and printmaking, I received travel stipends for summer research on the legislative history of school desegregation in the US. I was working with the Human Rights Center at Yale Law School at the time, reading and thinking about how to use color to reflect the emotional weight and social impact of these histories, especially as they’ve shaped public space. One of the first and most impactful cases I discovered was Sweatt v. Painter, in which a Black postal worker applied to the University of Texas Law School. His application was strong on every level, but he was then rejected because of their segregationist policy. That case became part of a series of lawsuits the NAACP Legal Defense Fund pursued, led by Thurgood Marshall. I had no idea any of this had happened in Houston. Learning about it drew me there in the summer of 2015.
While there, I connected with Project Row Houses. They let me use an empty row house studio, where I brought all the books I’d been reading, met community members, and made work in response. That became the foundation for my first New York gallery show as a represented artist.
So, Houston is deeply tied to my early body of work—and to me personally. I was conceived and born there, even though I grew up in Southern and Northern California. I’ve always looked at my birth certificate and wondered what Houston could have meant for me if I had stayed. Maybe now, through this show, I’ll get a better understanding.
XJW: How does it feel to have this kind of homecoming?
TJ: Jenny, I can’t even put it into words.
I was talking yesterday with a brilliant musician friend, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, about the show. We realized that just like how I was conceived and born in Houston before being taken to LA to grow up, with the show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston being up for nine months, I now get a second chance, another nine whole months in the city where I was born. It really feels magical.
XJW: Given recent events like increasing levels of censorship and attempts to erase the histories of communities of color, do you feel a new urgency to address these issues in your work? Has your research process changed because of the shifting access to information?
TJ: I’m currently working on another project in Baltimore, Maryland, that’s focused on the histories of libraries, museums, and community-organized spaces for practicing visual arts and the humanities. We're asking: How have these spaces come into being over decades through people coming and going?
What’s come to the forefront for me is the importance of relationships—people being in proximity and choosing to build with one another, to share knowledge. You can’t ask deep questions or understand the present—or even imagine a future—without being willing to engage with the past. A lot of that engagement happens through education, which brings me back to a question I began exploring around 2013–2014: What is the history of school desegregation and educational access in this country? How has it affected me? How has it shaped public space? And how can I visualize that through painting, printmaking, and other visual art forms?
So what you're asking is very much at the top of my mind. The urgency is always there. It hasn’t changed. Because for any of us to be meaningful contributors to one another’s lives—and to imagine functional futures—it has always required reflection. It has always required engagement with what it means to be human. And that also means grappling with histories of exclusion—of who’s been denied access to that category of “human.” Those exclusions are well documented. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s not new.
I’m asking these questions because my access to people who take the visual arts and humanities seriously has always come through education. That’s the only reason I can even have this conversation with you—because I was taught by people who asked these questions before us.
That’s what led me back to Houston. In 2015, I was trying to stay focused—that was also the summer Sandra Bland was killed. She was taken in front of Prairie View A&M University—one of the places I’d planned to visit for archival research. And I thought, I could have been her—driving around alone, smoking a cigarette, trying to access history. She was back in town to teach. She was an alum. That summer also saw the pool party incident in McKinney, Texas.
So yes, Jenny—the urgency is always there. I’m now reading about the 1600s and 1700s, when the founding of colonial schools in New England happened right on top of the ruins of Indigenous monumental architecture, some of it predating Stonehenge by millennia. I went to MIT, took classes at Harvard, and ended up at Yale for painting and printmaking—the oldest art school in the country. And it’s complicated. These institutions offer access to archives, teachers, and the community that we might not otherwise reach. But we also have to ask: What came before us? How did these spaces come to be?
Let me read something to you. This is from the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. It says:
“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must give full value and support to other branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future. Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education and access to the arts and humanities designed to make people of all backgrounds, wherever located, masters of their technology—and not its unthinking servants.”
Tomashi Jackson, Ecology of Fear, 2020. Archival prints on PVC marine vinyl, Pentelic marble dust, acrylic paint, American election flyers, Greek ballot papers, paper bags, and muslin mounted on a handcrafted select pine structure with brass hooks and grommets, cinder blocks. Collection of Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen.
XJW: Do you sometimes feel like history is repeating itself? Do you ever get disheartened? I was part of a panel discussion at the Abrons Arts Center recently, and one of the panelists said backstage, “Sometimes I’m just so tired of this fight.” How do you stay motivated?
TJ: I feel that. I feel you, and I feel them. I’m lucky that my path as an artist has allowed me to work with people who care deeply about history. They keep me hopeful. My best friends do amazing work. So many of the people I hold closest are focused on better futures—futures that are fully informed by critical reflection on the past. The people I work with, and those I love, pull me back from the edge and keep me grounded and focused.
XJW: The press release mentioned Joseph Albers and color relativity. Could you speak a bit about how you use color to convey your message?
TJ: I’ve always been obsessed with color. I was really fortunate to grow up in Southern California in the ’80s with access to an elementary school focused on the performing and visual arts. We worked with practicing artists and were encouraged to think and imagine in color. We had this legendary second-grade teacher who helped us understand the difference between Manet and Monet—and we worked together as seven-year-olds to create large-scale versions of Monet’s Water Lilies. So from early on, I was encouraged to nurture questions around image-making.
Growing up, I was surrounded by a strong tradition of muralism extending across the Southwest, including Texas. Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, California muralists like Juana Alicia and Susan Cervantes, and Texas painters like John Thomas Biggers and James Biggers helped me understand how to use color to tell stories in the built environment—how to translate mood, how to depict something coming out of darkness into light.
When I went back to school from 2014 to 2016 to study painting and printmaking, I had another chance to revisit Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. When the Bauhaus collapsed, many survivors came to the US. Albers, too, came to the US with his wife after escaping Nazism, first teaching at Black Mountain College and later going on to Yale. He transformed how color is taught.
When I was in school, I studied with Robert Reed. He had gone from Morgan State to Yale, where he became the first—and longest tenured—Black faculty member at the Yale School of Art. He studied directly under Albers during the development of Interaction of Color, and all the plates in that book were hand-pulled silkscreens made by students. At every school I attended, we studied Interaction of Color. It teaches how chromatic relationships create optical illusions: when warm and cool colors meet, they can produce the illusion of brightness, shadow, or vibration. Our eyes interpret these chromatic experiences through contrast and adjacency.
At the same time I was re-learning this as an adult, I was also reading case law—specifically around Brown v. Board of Education. And I started noticing a linguistic overlap. The way Albers described color as a chromatic phenomenon—its instability, its tendency to shift depending on context—I saw similar language used to describe color as a social phenomenon in those legal texts.
There was this paranoia about “mixing,” these assumptions about the dire consequences of proximity across color lines. It hit me: color is both chromatic and social. I started thinking about those manmade boundaries—these “color lines” mentioned in court transcripts—that divide people based on this imagined, catastrophic border.
Meanwhile, I was studying with Sarah Oppenheimer, learning about how color appears on screens and how the cones in our eyes process light. For instance, our brains process yellow by combining signals from their interpretation of red and green colors. She took us to a VR lab at Brown University, where we spoke with people working in visual cognition. That experience, and others like it, helped me develop a much deeper, more instinctual relationship to color.
Now, when I see purple or violet, I know that if I want to create a subtle effect or evoke a particular feeling, I can use yellow or gold—even just a trace. Almost none of my paintings use white. What appears as white is always a response to what's underneath—to the color of the substrate.
D’TALENTZ (BIG KITO, A-DOGG, KING, & TOMMY TONIGHT), “The Secret Garden,” 2020.
XJW: Do you see your work as addressing solely American issues? Or are you thinking more globally?
TJ: Definitely globally. My first solo show in London, Silent Alarm, opened in March 2024 at Pilar Corrias Gallery. It looked at the history of uprisings and the role of community sound systems—how they developed in response to police brutality.
I was raised in LA and lived through the 1992 rebellion after the beating of Rodney King. My mother had participated in the Watts Rebellion in the ‘60s. Those memories stayed with me. When I started learning about the Brixton Rebellion in the UK and student uprisings protesting tuition hikes, I saw connections. In the UK, demonstrators protested the imposition of school fees that would make education less accessible. Their educational system had been publicly funded—similar to how ours once was. I just learned, actually, about the Higher Education Act of 1965, which shifted our system from being fully funded to one based on loans, effectively making higher education contingent on taking on debt. And in England, as those changes were being introduced, students walked out—and were met with excessive force. I’m telling you all this to say that I’m deeply interested in global histories, and there are oftentimes various lines of interconnection, the more you learn about these events.
Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe will be on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from May 30, 2025 to March 29, 2026.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
