In Conversation: Connie H. Choi, Tomashi Jackson, Alex Jackson

Portraits of Connie H. Choi, Alex Jackson, and Tomashi Jackson

Connie H. Choi, Alex Jackson, and Tomashi Jackson

Join esteemed curator Connie H. Choi as we delve into the practices of Tomashi Jackson and Alex Jackson, two artists who seamlessly intertwine teaching, artmaking, and activism.

This fall, Ruth Arts is pleased to inaugurate its speaker series program. Each month from September through December, artists, curators, researchers, and other cultural practitioners will join in conversation to discuss topic(s) inspired by the legacy of artist, educator, and activist Benny Andrews (1930–2006). These dialogues are presented in conjunction with Trouble, a multifaceted exhibition that combines Andrews’ extensive archive with a selection of his paintings and works on paper to reflect the fullness of the artist’s practice, life, and advocacy, and the ways they are intertwined.

Space is limited, RSVP required.

Speakers

Connie H. Choi

New York

Connie H. Choi is Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she oversees the Museum’s collections and is working on projects toward its reopening. Prior to joining the Studio Museum, Choi was the assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum. She is on the advisory committees of the Andrews-Humphrey Family Foundation and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Choi has a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University, an Ed.M. in arts education from Harvard University, and a B.A. in the history of art from Yale University.

Alex Jackson

Pennsylvania

Alex Jackson’s (b. 1993, Milwaukee, WI) practice emerges from a developing narrative text embedded in the expanding universe of E, a polychromatic phantom living in a universe spawned from the atomization of his physical body. A space conditioned by light that behaves like subtractive color, uneven spatial grammars, and populated with beings of corporeal fugitivity. Jackson uses worldbuilding, fantasy, myth, and speculative fiction to stake a claim to the future, to build an imaginative universe that tends to the entangled complexity of the aesthetic and social histories of liberation strategies and black livingness.

Tomashi Jackson

Massachusetts

Tomashi Jackson, The Morehouse Creed (Participation in Prosperity), 2022

acrylic, Yule Quarry marble dust, and paper bags on textile, gauze, and canvas with PVC marine vinyl mounted on a handcrafted wood awning structure with brass hooks and grommets. 84 x 106 x 9 1/4 inches

Tomashi Jackson (b. 1980, Houston, TX) 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. Her work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and is featured 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 Baltimore Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, The Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, the Perez Museum, Miami and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. She lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.