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What Is Love traces painter Suzanne Jackson’s (US, b. 1944) lifelong devotion to beauty as a political force. As the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist’s career, the exhibition spans six decades of work and highlights her evolving engagement with poetry, dance, and theater.
At the center of Jackson’s practice is a dedication to both the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. Her joyful experimentations with color, light, and materiality refuse stereotypical notions of Blackness, insisting instead on complexity and tenderness. In her early figurative works, loose washes of acrylic paint reveal a reverence for memory and ancestral lineage. In later works, representational forms give way to abstraction.