JD Jackson

JD Jackson, began his public art career when at age twelve, encouraged by his parents, he entered the Toledo Blade Christmas Coloring Contest, in Toledo Ohio. Competing against nearly six thousand entries, he won first prize. He was recipient of numerous Toledo Art Interest Grants and awards throughout his middle and high school years, and frequented the Toledo Museum of Art, where he also studied. He attributes his continued involvement in the arts to a strong early foundation provided by the museum and his primary and secondary school art educators. Collectively, these early experiences inspired Jackson to pursue his college degrees in fine arts, realizing the fulfillment, and sense of purpose, that could be achieved through the fine arts.

In 1969, Jackson was one of the founders of "The Confederation of Black Artists" (COBA), which was organized to address and reverse the ongoing omission of minority artists in museums and galleries. The COBA inaugural show, jurored by Herbert Temple Executive Director of Art for Johnson Publishing Company Inc., brought Jackson national recognition by winning First Award in Sculpture.  COBA was the impetus behind the Annual Multicultural Art Exhibition, sponsored by the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo.

Jackson received professional art training at Bowling Green State University, School of Art, where he received his undergraduate BFA degree in 1970, in painting and drawing. He is a post graduate of Michigan State University, School of Art, where in 1972 he earned his M.F.A. in visual art/ painting and drawing. He studied under American Regionalist painter and lithographer John S. deMartelly, and post-modernist painter Angelo Ippollito. Throughout the 1970's and early 1980's he frequented the studio of New York painter Romare Bearden, where he received valuable mentorship and encouragement. During that same period, he worked in The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition of New York, under renowned New York painter Benny Andrews, who went on to become Director of Visual Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington D.C.  Andrews wrote of Jackson in "Encore International Magazine," August 1975:  “JD Jackson, a painter who came to New York last year and created a stir is, in a word “dynamic.”  He impresses many of the old time artists. Jackson’s portfolio was in such good order that several Madison Avenue dealers pleaded with him to become part of their stables . . .” 

Jackson’s career has produced a long list of recognition and awards for his works and he has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally, including The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, The Alms Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, The Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing Michigan, The Cinque Gallery, New York, The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio.   In addition to his national presence, he broadened his international perspective traveling in Europe and after being invited to New Deli India by national Urdu poet Darshan Singh, to create a series of motifs for a fifteen volume anthology.  

His work is included in numerous private and public collections, with such notables as Romare Bearden, Harry Bertola, Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, Richard Hunt, Lois Mailou Jones, Donald Drumm, Benny Andrews, and Charles White, and collections including the Hope Sloan Colgate, and the Johnson Publishing Company.

In 1973, he was commissioned by Bowling Green State University to create a 15' x 30' painting titled, Songs for the Stellar Worlds, in the newly renovated Eva Marie Saint Theater for the Performing Arts, the cornerstone building of the university.  In 1992, he was honored with the award of Distinguished Graduate in the Fine and Performing Arts at Bowling Green State University.

In 1997, one of Jackson's works, a concrete frieze relief mural titled, Soliloquy on the Origins of Aboriginal Abstractions, which was commissioned in 1975 by The City of Toledo, Ohio, and The Toledo American Bicentennial Commission, was included in The Art in Public Places Collection, by The Arts Commission of Greater Toledo.  The sculpture graces the main entrance of the new Frederick Douglas Community Center building, in central city Toledo. In addition, The Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., has included the sculpture in its “Inventory of American Sculpture”.

Over a period of two decades, JD Jackson taught at Michigan State University, Bowling Green State University, and The Ohio State University, as Assistant Professor of Art. From 1991- 1994, he mentored graduate students in the M.F.A. Low Residency Visual Arts degree program at Vermont College of Norwich University, Montpelier, Vermont.

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Since 1994 Jackson has worked at The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, with the Exhibition Design Department as a Preparator of Exhibitions.

In 2003 he was selected to work with the Dale Chihuly team on the installation of the Chihuly Signature Collection, at the Franklin Park Conservatory, Columbus, Ohio.  He was retained to conserve the installation for the duration of the show. In October of  2004, the Franklin Park Conservatory purchased the entire exhibition, and Jackson was named  conservator for the permanent Chihuly Signature Art Collection, which he holds to date. That year he also worked on the art installation of a Shona Stone Sculpture Exhibition, from Zimbabwe, “Chapungu” at The Franklin Park Conservatory.

In addition to studio work and Chihuly,  Jackson has been assistant to international “stickwork” sculptor, Patrick Dougherty, installing Dougherty’s  “Branching Out” Exhibition,  (April-June, 2006), and working with New York artists for the exhibition, “Bending Nature” (October, 2008 – March 29, 2009), at the Franklin Park Conservatory.  In that same year he worked with Chihuly Studios on an exhibition called “Chihuly

Re-imagined”.

In 2010, Jackson was commissioned by the Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington West Virginia, to restore the museum’s Chihuly Glass Tower, in The Museum Conservatory, biosphere, and to conduct a clinic on “how to maintain the glass tower in the future” for the exhibition designers and preparators at the museum.      

Most recently, Jackson worked in collaboration with New England based artist,  Johanne deMartelly,  in editing the exhibition catalog for (her grandmother), artist, Marie Spaeth (1870 – 1937),  exhibition titled “Among the Birches” (April – October, 2012)  at the Harvard Fruitlands Museum, Massachusetts.