Artist Oliver Lee Jackson: 'Right now humans are in a desperate spiritual place' – The Standard

7 April 2025

Oliver Lee Jackson has always been wary of politics. That is not to say that the artist, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1935, at a time when very few African-American working-class men made their way to art school, has not been involved in political movements virtually his entire career.

In the late 1960s he advised the St. Louis collective of musicians, poets, dancers and artists known as the Black Artists Group, while in 1971 he developed the curriculum for the Pan African department at the California State University in Sacramento, where he taught until 2002. Both bodies were born out of the struggles of racial segregation.

In his art, however, Jackson has largely avoided reference to specific historical or political events, except for a series of paintings he created in the 1970s based on photographs of Anti-Apartheid demonstrators escaping the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 in Johannesburg.

Instead, his paintings—which are on show in London for the first time at Lisson Gallery—resist definition: they are spaces for contemplation and multiple interpretation, free from the constraints of language (he never titles his works, preferring to number and mark them in pencil with a copyright symbol) and the false oppositions that seek to divide people.

“When you take sides, whether it’s black or white, you got a position. You’re missing it,” the artist says. “These struggles degrade, and even if you win, it takes a while to come back from that. The battle itself degrades you. You can become so degraded by the action of relieving yourself of oppression that you yourself become what the United States is a perfect example of: the bully.”

Continue reading the rest of Oliver Lee Jackson's interview with Anny Shaw for The Standard here.