Oliver Lee Jackson

Malin Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Oliver Lee Jackson: Take the House. Based in Oakland, the 84-year-old artist has been pursuing his singular artistic vision for over five decades.Take the House is the gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Jackson and follows his acclaimed exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington: Oliver Lee Jackson - Recent Paintings. Take the House features 16 large scale paintings drawn from a 40-year span of the artist's career accompanied by sculpture and works on paper.

Artworks by Oliver Lee Jackson reside in the permanent collections of many major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco); the Studio Museum the Detroit Institute of the Arts (Detroit); the St. Louis Museum of Art (St. Louis); and the Seattle Art Museum (Seattle).

Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935, St. Louis, Missouri) is a painter, sculptor and printmaker based in Oakland, California. Jackson was awarded a BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University (1958) and an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City (1963). During the 1960s, Jackson worked extensively with community-based arts groups in the St. Louis region during which time he was Assistant Director of the People’s Art Center and later the Director of Program Uhuru. He was closely aligned with the landmark Black Artists Group (BAG), which included musicians, theater performers and dancers in addition to visual artists, and he was a close collaborator of renowned jazz musician Julius Hemphill. Jackson also co-founded the arts organization African Continuum.

Jackson was an artist-in-residence at Harvard University from 2000-2001. His artwork has been exhibited extensively at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Museo de Arte Moderno (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); the Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA); the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Illinois); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); and the New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA). Jackson's recent show at Burning in Water Gallery (New York), Untitled Original, was recommended by Artnet News and Time Out - New York and selected as a "must-see" exhibition by Artforum magazine.

"Because of my relationships with music and musicians, I began to understand how I could approach making something — starting the with the first mark, that very first mark.

The musicians I was listening to might begin very, very softly - touching silence tenderly or harshly. In doing either, they never seemed to violate the silence. That’s what I was trying to do in making — achieve directness. Directness is personal. To be direct is to be yourself. To be yourself is to know yourself.

Musicians take the house with sound. I take it through sight.

Beethoven’s Fifth - how does he take the space? [Sings the opening motif]. He took it!

Well, you can do it with color - a splash of red. Bam!

See? I understood."

- Oliver Lee Jackson