Ward Jackson: Black and White Diamonds 1960s
Published on the occasion of Ward Jackson’s (1928-2004) solo exhibition Black and White Diamonds 1960s at MINUS SPACE, 2014.
Texts by Eleanor Heartney, Julian Jackson, Rene Lynch
Published by the Estate of Ward Jackson & MINUS SPACE, 2014
60p, color, softcover, 8 x 8 inches
ISBN: (none)
Biography
Ward Jackson (b. 1928 Petersburg, VA; d. 2004 New York, NY) studied painting at the Richmond Polytechnic Institute of the College of William and Mary, now Virginia Commonwealth University, earning his Master's Degree in 1952. As a student, he began to correspond with Guggenheim curator Hilla Rebay, which would eventually lead to his long tenure with the museum. Following graduation Jackson spent a summer studying with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, before finally settling in New York City in the autumn of 1952. Jackson's work as a student had attracted the attention of Park Avenue Cubist and critic George L. K. Morris who invited him to participate in an American Abstract Artists (AAA) exhibition in 1949 at the Riverside Museum, NYC. Morris, a founding member of the prestigious AAA, took Jackson under his wing and the two developed a close collegial relationship, which lasted until Morris' untimely death in 1975. In 1976, Jackson was inducted into AAA and for many years served as the group’s secretary.
During his lifetime, Jackson exhibited widely throughout the United States, as well as in Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain and Japan. Highlights include solo exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s at the Graham Gallery, French and Company Gallery, and the short lived, but seminal, John Daniels Gallery, which was founded by Dan Graham and David Herbert (all NYC). As the winner of two Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowships, Jackson had two solo exhibitions at the museum during the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jackson developed an active career in Europe with numerous solo exhibitions in Germany, including at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Museum Morsbroich (Leverkusen), and Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum (Duisburg).
Posthumously his work was included in the 2004 Guggenheim Museum exhibition Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present. In 2007, he was the subject of a comprehensive memorial retrospective Ward Jackson: A Life in Painting at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, NY, which included a catalog featuring an essay by Stephen Westfall and a panel discussion with Westfall, Jed Perl, Phong Bui and Matthew Deleget. In 2013, Jackson was prominently featured in the article The Hard-Edge Sign by Stephen Westfall published in Art in America magazine. The article traced the history and development of geometric hard-edged painting in the United States and included a large-scale reproduction of one of Jackson's River Series paintings.
Jackson’s paintings and drawings can be found in numerous public collections, including The National Museum of American Art Smithsonian (Washington, DC); Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum (all NYC); San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art (San Francisco, CA); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University (Waltham, MA); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond, VA); British Museum (London, UK); and Kunsthalle Bremen, Museum Morsbruch, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum (all Germany).
Also of note, in 1969, Jackson joined forces with publisher Roger Peskin and Guggenheim staff photographer Paul Katz to found the experimental folio publication ART NOW New York. The venture paired loose prints of art works recently exhibited in the galleries with brief original statements solicited from the artists. Over a four-year period, ART NOW New York published the work of well over one hundred of the period’s most significant figures, from Jasper Johns to Brice Marden, Louise Bourgeois to Robert Smithson. ART NOW gradually developed into the ubiquitous and well-known ART NOW Gallery Guide, for which Jackson served as advisory editor until 1998.