For Frieze Los Angeles 2022, Ortuzar Projects is pleased to exhibit a solo presentation of painter, dancer, poet, and scenic designer Suzanne Jackson spanning more than fifty years of work. Her earliest acrylic paintings, in which vibrant color is washed in layers onto canvas, poetically merge the natural and the personal in near abstract compositions. (As in Triplical Communications, 1969.) Her most recent suspended acrylic paintings release color from any traditional fiber support, drawing organic and other materials— loquat seeds, lace, mesh and woven cane fragments— into lyrical gestures scaled to the room. A special feature of this selection is the major triptych In A Black Man’s Garden, 1973, originally shown at the Ankrum Gallery on La Cienaga Boulevard. Its sparse and mystical forms— defined by color— envision an environmental utopia that aesthetically countered the militancy of that era. Ortuzar Projects presented a groundbreaking exhibition of Jackson’s work in 2019, followed by a historic group exhibition focusing on her activity in 1970s Los Angeles in 2021.

Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, St. Louis) lives and works in Savannah, Georgia. From 1969 –70 she ran Gallery 32 from her live/work studio at 672 South Lafayette Park Place in Los Angeles. Recent solo and survey exhibitions include In Nature’s Way..., The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2022); Off the Wall, Mnuchin Gallery, New York (2021); News!, Ortuzar Projects, New York (2019); Five Decades, Jepson Center/ Telfair Museums, Savannah (2019); holding on to a sound, O-Town House, Los Angeles (2019); Life Model: Charles White and His Students, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); West by Midwest, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018 –19); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Brooklyn Museum, New York and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (2018 –20); Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960 –1980, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, New York, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2011–13); Gallery 32 & Its Circle, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2009). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Her work has been recognized by awards granted by Anonymous Was a Woman (2021), New York Foundation for the Arts (2021), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019).