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Tomashi Jackson

she//her//hers, they//them//theirs

Painter and Interdisciplinary Visual Artist

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Tomashi, a Black woman with long brown locs, wears an olive-green top and several layered thin gold necklaces. She stands before a colorful backdrop and gazes directly at the viewer.

Photo by Nik Massey.

I’m committed to the visual arts and the humanities. Everyday, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with people who are also so committed to their areas of public concern and growth. I’ve ended up being oddly hopeful and really supportive in a place that I didn't intend to stay in.”

Tomashi Jackson creates vibrant works combining practices of painting, printmaking, video, photography, fiber, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure policy. This work interrogates the intersection of languages between visual art and political histories of segregation, voting rights, education, transportation, labor, and housing in the U.S. and beyond.

Works by Jackson are in the collections of MOCA, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. She was awarded the de Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s Rappaport Prize in 2023 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2020. Jackson's work is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Pilar Corrias in London. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Acrylic, Yule quarry marble dust paste, and paper bags on black canvas with brass hooks and grommets on a handcrafted wood awning structure. This painting combines an image women playing double dutch and another of two friends embracing. Sections of the work feature yellow, orange, pink, and white blocks of color overlaid on top of the images.

Get On Up (Women Double Dutching/Two Friends Embracing) by Tomashi Jackson, 2024. Acrylic, Yule quarry marble dust paste, and paper bags on black canvas with brass hooks and grommets on a handcrafted wood awning structure, 62.5 × 97 × 9 inches.

Photo courtesy of Night Gallery.

Two mixed media works are hung on the wall. Each are comprised of sheets of linen hung on pieces of wood. The painting combines two images in painted interwoven strips of people gathered in a Boston South End club line dancing together at a celebration and a still of CCTV footage of LAPD officers laughing as an elder Black man in their custody in medical distress dies from asphyxiation. Visually, the works feature strong diagonal lines and swaths of bright pink, blue, and orange.

Could I Be The One? (Community Members Do the Electric Slide 2023 and LAPD Officer Juan Romero and Others Laughing 2012) I and II by Tomashi Jackson, 2024. Acrylic, Yule quarry marble dust paste, and Los Angeles palm frond ash paste on linen and canvas with wood, 60.25 × 53 inches.

Photo courtesy of Tilton Gallery.