Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

On May 14, the Walker Art Center will open Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love, the first major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of groundbreaking artist Suzanne Jackson. The exhibition traces Jackson’s lifelong devotion to beauty as a political force. She began showing her work in the late 1960s, an era when Black artists in the United States were often pressed to make figurative work with a clear political message. Jackson remained committed to paving her own unique path and to creating on her own terms, producing an extraordinary body of work characterized by abstraction, lyricism, and material experimentation. What Is Love marks the most comprehensive survey of her work to-date, featuring more than 50 works and reflecting six decades of artistic innovation.  

At the center of Jackson’s practice is a dedication to both the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. Her joyful experimentations with color, and materiality refuse stereotypical notions of Blackness, insisting instead on complexity and tenderness. In her early figurative works, loose washes of paint reveal a reverence for memory and ancestral lineage. In later works, representational forms give way to abstraction. Guided by the notion that beauty is an act of care and a means of survival, Jackson’s work invites us to consider the very nature of love. 

Over the course of her illustrious and multifaceted career, Jackson has been a dancer, poet, educator, gallerist, costume and set designer, and arts administrator, but she is first and foremost a painter. What Is Love follows her distinct painting practice, from her early ethereal compositions on canvas to her three-dimensional paintings of the past 20 years. In these more recent works, paint is liberated from the canvas and built into luminous compositions grounded in a translucent base and suspended in midair. Across a career defined by innovations in material and form, Jackson explores the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. 

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love will be on view at the Walker from May 14 through August 23, 2026. It is co-organized by the Walker and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where it debuted in fall 2025. At the Walker, the exhibition is curated by Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Associate Curator, Visual Arts, with support provided by Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts. Following the Walker presentation, the show will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  

“Jackson has built an extraordinary practice over decades; one that joins formal rigor with sensuality, feeling, and fierce independence,” said Jasper. “What Is Love is an urgent and full account of an artist whose achievement has never fit neatly into the categories used to contain her. This exhibition makes clear that her work is not peripheral to the story of American art, but essential to it.” 

Curatorial team: Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Associate Curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, Curatorial Assistant, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Laurel Rand‐Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center. 

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

Support
Major support is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

The Walker Art Center’s presentation is made possible with lead support from the John Gabbert and the Room & Board Foundation Exhibition Fund. Major support is provided by the Pohlad Family, and John Taft and Laura Delaney Taft. Additional support is provided by Carlo Bronzini Vender, Deborah and John Christakos, and Susan and Rob White.