On a warm summer day in Savannah, Suzanne Jackson invited ARTS Southeast & IMPACT Magazine to come over to her studio to look at artwork, listen to jazz, and join her in what turned out to be an amazing conversation. Our talk spanned a lifetime of artmaking.

Suzanne Jackson’s life and work flow together, creating a rich bohemian tapestry that includes stints as a ballet dancer, costume designer, gallerist, poet, professor, and of course, a highly esteemed artist.

Jackson’s artwork exists somewhere between painting and sculpture. Her assemblages are carefully considered and packed full of meaning. Objects taken from her storied life, and even her physical home, are illuminated and given new life and meaning within a work of art.

Suzanne Jackson: I mean, that’s how I experiment: I start with stuff – I use a lot of things from my life. Look at the top of this piece, that’s part of the roofing, from the new roof that I put on top of the building. So is that piece of wood at the top – there’s a piece of wood, a piece of metal – those are all scraps left over. I’d never let the construction workers get away with throwing that in the dumpster. That’s what my work is about, it’s about using up things that we would throw out.

Jon Witzky: When I look at your artwork, I can’t help but think about music – probably because I love to listen to you and Ike on his radio program.

SJ: When I came here to work at SCAD, it turns out a lot of the artists here in Savannah were listening to all kinds of really good music all the time. Then, when I met Ike Carter, who I had been listening to for 15 years before I’d ever seen him, I said, “You know, Ike, everybody listens to your music.” He wasn’t even aware of that! It’s like he’s the voice of Savannah.

Emily Earl: Yeah, he is the voice of Savannah.

SJ: And the WHCJ radio station – there’s reggae, there’s blues, there’s gospel – and all those people are volunteering. Some of those people have been there longer than Ike or Hanif, who does the reggae show.

EE: I just met Hanif!

SJ: Isn’t he something?

EE: He’s so cool, and you know, I recognized him by his voice, because I heard him talking and I was like, “Do you do a reggae radio show?”

SJ: Well I heard about him before I even arrived here – I had met a young guy who had studied architecture or something at SCAD, who was incredible – he could draft with ink, which I thought was just amazing. By then I knew about Toots and the Maytals, and Bob Marley – and he was telling me, “You don’t know anything – I’ve just come from Savannah, and I’ve listened to some really good reggae music.” So that’s the reputation all the way over to California. And I know Ike, wherever he goes, he can’t open his mouth without heads turning.

(laughter)

EE: Well that voice, I mean –

SJ: You know, doing that radio program was really a good experience, because we’d have to choose the music. And one of my pieces, Saudades – oh that’s that piece [points to artwork] – is made up of pieces from my family, and that word fit so beautifully for this – the word is hard to translate but it means that memories, they can be good or bad – but when you bring them back up, it’s not the same as what it was before. If it was a good memory, it’ll be a good memory, but it’s never going to stay the same.

English becomes so cut and dried. But when you have words from other languages, sometimes they speak volumes, they have all the history that goes with them over decades and centuries. So this piece, Saudades, actually was named because it has pieces from everybody in my family. These tins right here, these are the ones that my mother actually packed all of her dishes and pots and pans from St. Louis to San Francisco – and they ended up in New Haven with me, and then here in Savannah. Those ribs, they came from the tops of these barrels, I feel like these are sacred barrels. They’re really strong. (knocking on them)

So there’s bells for my son – one of his friends told me, “He used to say, ‘rock the bells, rock the bells’” – do you know that song?

JW: LL Cool J?

SJ: Could be – when we lived in New Haven he had big posters of Ice T. So, those bells represent his “rock the bells.” I feel that bells are very spiritual. There may be a T-shirt in there, or my father’s tie, some pieces from my mother, so there’s something from our whole family in Saudades.

One day I pulled out this album by Jim Snidero & Jeremy Pelt, just by chance, and it had this obscure song called “Saudade,” and after I had done this work I realized it just fit perfectly. So when I found that music, it was like, “Oh, this is the perfect description of what it is I’m trying to say in this work.” But it’s been hanging here in the studio now, and I can’t wait til I get it to Chicago.

JW: It’s a beautiful piece. What are you working on now? What’s going to Chicago?

SJ: This new piece I’m working on right here – this was a long piece, and it kept growing. I have another piece called A Hole in the Marker – Mary Turner 1918, it’s about a lynching here in Georgia. The woman’s husband was lynched and when she protested they lynched her while she was pregnant.

EE: Terrible.

SJ: Yeah. And this woman wrote an article about how she and her son were going around Georgia looking at monuments, and they found the one for Mary Turner, and her son was just playing around while she was reading it and found bullet cartridges. Somebody had shot up the monument. That was the first I knew of that event. And that piece, A Hole in the Marker, it kept growing and growing and growing, and it started with a figure in it – I was trying to do a figurative thing at first, and then that all disappeared into the piece; a long gold column with a blue circle at the top. I just learned that the sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller did a piece on Mary Turner back in 1919, back when it actually happened – and she used gold on it too. I didn’t know about that until just last month, when I was reading the essay that this other person had written. So it was like a strange, creepy thing that –

JW: You had tapped into.

SJ: Right.

JW: Can we go back in time? Back to LA and your gallery, Gallery 32…

SJ: I’ve been thinking about Betye Saar, she’s been in the same house all the years that I’ve known her in Laurel Canyon, ever since the 60’s – great place. And because I was moving around so much, people thought I’d left the country. They didn’t know where I was. There were a lot of strange stories.

JW: Now that group of people that you knew in the late 60’s, early 70’s in LA – I mean that was a really wild scene.

SJ: I know! Now everybody’s on the East Coast, or at least we have galleries here that represent us. Back then, we were not considered mainstream, but when I saw Soul of a Nation at the Brooklyn Museum, it was like, “Woah, wait a minute, look at the work that we were all doing back then in the 60’s.” And now everybody’s trying to catch up with what we were doing back then!

JW: What was your crew like? I mean, they weren’t really hippies.

SJ: Well no, when I moved from Alaska to the Bay Area it was because I was impressed with the Beats! But I was too young to be a Beat, too old to be a hippie – so I’m in that bohemian middle part. When I moved to Los Angeles, the fella I was with, Smitty, was 33. When I met Smitty, I never knew his age. I thought he was much younger, but we went on this trip, a group of people, and we stopped at a filling station and his license was up on the dashboard. And it turned out he was 38 years old and I was 22! He was such a gentleman! My parents liked him, he was just a really nice guy.

He introduced me to William Pajaud, who is a well-known watercolorist in Los Angeles – and Howard Morehead, who was a photographer – photographed jazz musicians. There were these guys sitting there – he said, “I want you to go meet these guys, because they’re artists, and you’re an artist.” And I’m in my mini skirt, little bitty thing, and I go to meet them – they’re all sitting around playing cards and they look at me like, “Yeah, ok, uh huh… yeah, little girl. Cute little girl you brought around here, Smitty.”

I was in exhibitions with Pajaud later on. You know, I got to talk to him before he passed away, and remind him of that time.

JW: Emily and I were just talking about the, now legendary, Sapphire Show. It was actually a response to the Carnation show that was happening at the time, featuring mainly male, Black artists. Emily brought up the thought that to revisit that exhibition so many years later… there’s something exciting and special about that.

SJ: And I didn’t even want to do it! I didn’t remember that it was the 4th of July weekend. At that point actually I was engaged to be married – I was having to close the gallery – so my head was in weird places! It happened that Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor, who had an exhibition at the time, Eileen [Nelson, nee Abdulrashid] who was also having a show then, and Yvonne Cole Meo, somehow, we were all there in the room at the same time. And Betye Saar had been coming to the gallery a long time, you know, from the beginning. I was engaged and was married at the end of August. I think I went to jail for parking tickets. Those sort of things happen that make you think, “Ok, that was not such a great time.”

JW: Too much at once…

SJ: It was that period of time when they were just putting everyone in jail. It was just a rough time. I think Angela Davis was in jail, the Manson women… all kinds of people were in jail then.

Then my marriage dissolved and it was over with. You know, it was a great wedding and a bad marriage. And then I was pregnant! Because me and Princess Diana got pregnant like that - the first time! So I was going through all these life changes. So for me – and I think this is the first time I’m really talking about this - it was just a time that was full of a lot of stress, I think. And I didn’t remember anything about it except that we did it. And the poster still exists with the misspelling of Betye’s name!

SJ: But it turned out to be a really good thing. And Betye was really happy about it, so was Senga [Nengudi]. All the other women were happy, you know, who were still alive – Betye, Senga, and Eileen… she was happy to be able to redo the show. It was wonderful. That’s the way they are at Ortuzar Projects. They’re about the artists and the art.

EE: Very nice.

SJ: I think the way that I grew up with my family and the schools I was in, it was always about “If you are doing well – even if you’re not doing well - you share whatever you have.” That’s how we existed as artists when I moved to Los Angeles: We all shared, down to the last bowl of noodles. That’s just how we supported one another. At that point, it was just, “Ok, we’re doing this, and we’re just gonna help each other do it.” That’s why I try to guide people to things that I think are interesting, where the artists are going to be – things that they wouldn’t see as a tourist. Savannah has so much history, and we’re a part of that.

EE: Definitely.

SJ: Right, there’s an important creative history – there was a group of us, I forget what it was called, the coalition of artists – with Betsy Cain, Carmela [Aliffi], and Jane [Fishman] – the whole idea was, we were looking at all the markers that were downtown, the historic markers, and thought, we need some “artist markers!” You know, let’s let people know where the artists are! And at one point we had a map of all the artist studios around town. We need to do that again!

You know, Betsy and I – we stayed at Ossabaw together. When we were out at Ossabaw we were the rough and ready girls! We shared a room together – we were there for ten days – that was probably the last artist residency they had.

The problem there was that everyone who stays there is supposed to fix a meal for everyone, so it turns out all we were doing was eating! Three times a day we’re eating these fabulous meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner – you had to be there for breakfast – to do the courtesy of eating – just because someone is making the meal! A group would leave and then another would come in, so for 10 days we would just be eating!

My mother and Sandy West were the same age – I just noticed the other day they were born the same year, 1913. My mother died at ninety-five – Sandy lived to 108!

JW: You have this beautiful fabric that you have incorporated from your mother’s quilts – Emily and I were talking about the idea of quiltmaking and tapestries and all of these kinds of other things that are making their way into your work. Do you think about it in that way – is your work a type of quiltmaking?

SJ: No! Way back when I was living in the Bay Area, Faith Ringgold had an exhibition at Mills College, which was way out in Oakland – a wonderful women’s college. Faith had her first exhibition of those quilts that she had inherited from her mother. Faith Ringgold said, “When you inherit your mother’s quilts, you have to finish them.” That was just awful for me, because my mother had been working on quilts since 1937 and hadn’t finished any of them! She actually had a show here at the Beach Institute – Carol Greene curated a show of her work.

EE: Wow!

SJ: She had a museum show before I did! Her show, when she was 88 years old, was mostly the quilt covers that she hadn’t finished. She had one she had started for my son that basically went all the way up to the ceiling – she just kept adding and adding and didn’t stop. So it could’ve been like a king-sized bed the size of this room that the quilt would fit on! So I found those pieces of hers and at first I hesitated, but I put those in Hers and His. I also found these pillowcases that were so typical of my mother – “hers and his” pillowcases – that she would have ironed before they went on the bed. She used to iron my father’s boxer shorts! I said to her, “Mother, his bottom will iron the shorts!”

(laughter)

SJ: She said, “I can’t believe you said that!” She was surprised that I would say such a thing! But I really got the nerve up to go ahead and add those quilt pieces into that, and the pillowcases with the “hers and his,” because my mother’s way of decorating a house – even my father’s room, a room that’s supposed to be his room – she would still put all the frilly stuff in. You know, all the curtains I have on the other side of the house are all left over from my mother. I’ve looked at some of the other leftover quilt pieces, and it’s really hard for me to touch them because I still think about that thing that Faith Ringgold said about having to finish your mother’s quilts, and I thought, “I’d be doing this for the rest of my life!” I feel like her work is her work.

JW: Can you tell us a bit about your time with CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act]?

SJ: That was the 70’s, late 70’s. That would be… a contemporary version would be WPA.

JW: Right.

SJ: Alonzo Davis at Brockman Gallery had the only program where we were supposed to just make art. Everybody else had to either teach or do some social program connected with the art, you know, the way that most institutions now have to have some project on the side in order to get funding. You can’t just make art. But Alonzo had the program set up so we were just making art. It was public art, and we had to go out and find our sites. It wasn’t just artists, there were musicians, writers, visual artists – the group Hiroshima – and we were all right at Leimert Park. Some of the musicians that we play on the radio program were actually out there on the street performing in Leimert Park!

JW: Wow!

SJ: That’s just the people we knew. And that’s how that all came about. But we would have – some of the artists would have exhibitions, and we would have some workshops. We’d have one group session – there was Charles White, Betye Saar, Arthur Monroe, all of us. And it was mixed groups. So it was a group of artists all over the city who normally wouldn’t be together. There were some really good artists on the CETA Project who weren’t showing at museums, but were really good. Kerry James Marshall was an apprentice of the program, and so were Kinshasha Conwill and her husband Houston. She’s now at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC. It’s really funny to think that Kerry James Marshall was an apprentice assistant. He wasn’t even a main artist, he was an assistant!

JW: Yeah, he was a young man, I suppose?

SJ: Oh yeah, they were all teenagers basically. And Richard Wyatt Jr., who now is a really respected muralist – they were the teenagers who were really good and could draw really well.

JW: What an exciting time! You were talking with us earlier about restrictions – materially or socially. When I look at your work it feels so free, it’s so courageous. What has your trajectory been from that time – the early 70’s to your current explorations?

SJ: You know, I arrived in Savannah thinking I was going to work figuratively (laughs) and it went to some other place that sort of surprised me as well. But it’s taken a long time. And so every time they pull out an early work from the 60’s or 70’s, and they’re saying, “Oh, they’re so beautiful, the way they’re painted and the washes and things,” I’m thinking, “Well, I wasn’t so sure.” For example, the paintings that are at MoMA right now, Wind and Water – those were commissioned by Sonny Bono.

JW: Ok.

SJ: To me those were really awkward. I thought that was really awkward when I was doing it! Commissions are hard.

JW: Yeah.

SJ: I refused to do them after a certain point. You know, there were a couple I did for people where they would let me do whatever I wanted – but when you’re a young artist and you’re struggling, you take them on. Back then, I knew how to draw, but I was trying to break away from being too traditional – I think we all were, in a way. We all studied with Charles White at the Otis College of Art and Design, who was incredible! But most of us – David Hammons – you know, all of us who studied with him – broke away and have done other things, but it’s the spirit in the work that I think we still maintain. I feel as if I’ve been learning to paint all along. I’m still learning how to paint!

JW: You’re a distinguished poet too – part of Cave Canem [a poetry residency, retreat and literary service organization that supports African American poets].

SJ: Cave Canem. I was one of the first in that group.

SJ: I was in Southern Maryland and Lucille Clifton who was the Poet Laureate of Maryland, was teaching there at St. Mary’s College. She had a group called St. Mary’s Women Writers Group and I was invited to be in it. One day, I’m walking down the hallway when I saw this poster that said, “Submit your poetry to Cave Canem.” But I had missed the deadline! And then I saw the Poet Laureate of Maryland, Lucille Cliffton, I said, “Lucille, I missed the deadline! I really would like to do this!” She said, “Oh Suzanne, just send it in.”

(laughter)

SJ: “Just send it in,” and so I sent it in, not realizing, ok, you’ve got Lucille Cliffton saying, “do this.”

JW: Yeah.

SJ: The great thing about Cave Canem at that time, was that it didn’t matter whether you were a professional, a housewife, or a truck driver. It was a really wonderful opportunity. You were able to come back for three years – it didn’t have to be in succession – but you had a three year fellowship. Well now, after 25 years, a lot of the literature that’s been published by African American writers, literature that’s been getting Pulitzer Prizes and awards, came out of Cave Canem.

JW: Very exciting. You’ve begun thinking about archiving your work – can you tell me a bit about that project?

SJ: Part of what Ortuzar Projects has been doing with me is archiving all of my work. So they have an archive and an inventory and then eventually all the records will go to the Getty. LeRonn Brooks is there, he's great. All the artists who are being put into that archive will be listed alphabetically, not according to race. If you’re “Jackson,” you don’t go looking for “African American, Jackson,” you just go looking for that artist. The researcher is dealing with the African American archive, but that’s to include it in the work.

SJ: I’ve lived here now almost as long as I lived on the West Coast. I’m beginning to feel as if maybe I have a legacy here.

JW: You certainly do!

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