Alex Jackson

Alex Jackson’s (b. 1993, Milwaukee, WI) practice merges at the disciplines of both painting and writing, using narrative and worldbuilding as conceptual frameworks for image-making. His practice is centered around continuously expanding text, a book of records kept by a character known as The Architect, a maroon who believes he has fallen off of the edge of the earth. In this text, he describes a series of visions emerging from the obsidian walls of his volcanic dwelling, detailing the arrival of a “child with the skin of zero and the heart of a star, called E,” whose cardio-supernova results in the creation of a dimension, also named E, where the boundaries of matter become fractured, broken, and collapsed. Shifting away from conventional laws of physics, linear narratives, color theories, and racial imaginaries that position blackness as the site of negation, Jackson constructs a universe tending to the possible articulations of black life and black thought outside of the colonial paradigms of integration and reconciliation. This narrative space serves as the guiding foundation, ethos, and framework for his practice as a writer and image-maker.

Jackson currently lives and works in the greater Philadelphia area. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 and received his MFA from Yale University in 2017. He has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Yaddo. Recent exhibitions include Chrysalis at Jenkins Johnson Projects (Brooklyn, NY 2021), and Earthgrazer at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA 2023). His work can be found in public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and the DeYoung Museum.