Blessed Be the Rock (1920s Dearfield Group, 1970s Ruth Flowers in The Little Rectangle, & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir),” 2023. (Photo courtesy of Tilton Gallery)
Tomashi Jackson: Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture
Tomashi Jackson will deliver the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Visiting Artist Lecture as part of the Sam Fox School’s Public Lecture Series at WashU.
About Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson combines practices of painting, printmaking, and sculpture with archival research in areas of public infrastructure policy. The work interrogates intersections between formal languages of visual art and political languages driving histories of segregation, voting rights, education, transportation, labor, and housing in the United States. Considering color as both chromatic and social, Jackson’s work embraces compositional abstraction to investigate the interaction of color and its impact on the perceived value of human life in public space.
Jackson’s solo museum exhibitions include “Across the Universe,” organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, and traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Tufts University Art Galleries in Medford, Penn., and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; “SLOW JAMZ” at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, N.Y.; “The Land Claim” at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.; and “Love Rollercoaster” at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others.
Her work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in group exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum, Atlanta; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She is the recipient of the 2023 Rappaport Prize, the 2022 Roy R. Neuberger Prize, and the 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Her work is included in many public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; The Baltimore Museum of Art; The High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland; and the Tufts University Art Galleries. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work is exhibited and represented by the Tilton Gallery, New York City; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.
More Upcoming Lectures
Nov 19 at 5:30pm • Steinberg Auditorium
Artist Panel: Mary Weatherford and Katharina Grosse
Artists Katharina Grosse and Mary Weatherford, whose works are featured in Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, both engage forms of nonfigurative painting that have a strong sensorial presence. A discussion moderated by Sabine Eckmann, William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator, will explore how their polyphonic structures invite careful seeing to suggest alternative worlds.
Part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series
About the Artists
Katharina Grosse was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany in 1961. She has held professorships at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18) and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin (2000–9) and currently lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Her recent institutional exhibitions and on-site paintings include The Sprayed Dear at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (until January 2026), Wunderbild at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (until September 2025), Déplacer les étoiles, Centre Pompidou – Metz (2024–25); Why Three Tones Do Not Form a Triangle; Albertina, Vienna (2023–24); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022), toured to Kunstmuseum Bern (2023) and Kunstmuseum Bonn (2024). In June 2025, she realized a temporary in-situ work for Art Basel on the fair’s forecourt and the adjacent architectural structures. Museum collections include Albertina, Vienna; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Copenhagen; Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Magasin III, Stockholm; MARe (Muzeul de Artă Recentă / Museum of Recent Art), Bucharest; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee; Museum Azman, Jakarta; Museum of Fine Arts Bern; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Museum, Porto; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; and QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Photo Credit: Franz Grünewald
Mary Weatherford was born in Ojai, California. She earned a BA from Princeton University in 1984, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1985, and graduated with an MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2006. Weatherford makes paintings that evoke a specific time, locale, and temperature. Her recent works, in which the canvases are affixed and sometimes juxtaposed with working neon light, provide an elusive and sometimes radical comment on the legacy of gestural abstraction. Weatherford is noted for her masterful use of overlapping fields of color, and as her work has advanced the increasingly complex and luminous interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring have produced a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Antony Hoffman