About me
Oliver Lee Jackson is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman whose work is grounded in figuration. His artworks are in the permanent collections of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Detroit Institute of the Arts; New Orleans Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Saint Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Jose Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum, and many other public and private collections.
Oliver Lee Jackson was born in 1935 in St. Louis, Missouri. He began exhibiting his works in the mid-1960s. At that time, he was also active with community cultural projects in St. Louis. He served as Assistant Director of People's Art Center (1963-64) and as Director of Program Uhuru (1967-68), which he created at Pruitt & Igoe public housing to bring to low-income youth a constructive means of developing dialogue through arts programs. In St. Louis, Jackson became involved with the Black Artists Group (1968-72) through his close association with Julius Hemphill and others, acting as consultant and collaborator on multimedia arts presentations for the African American community (he was not an official BAG member). BAG was founded by musicians, theater artists, dancers, and visual artists who demanded a greater place in the cultural landscape for African American creative expression. In the early 1970s, Jackson articulated the concept of the African Continuum and using that name, he and other artists and community activists collaborated on presenting arts programs as a vehicle for showing the fullness and continuity of African creative traditions.
