Love, in the most beautiful sense, has taken over the Museum of Fine Arts! Boston’s beloved museum is celebrating more than six decades of lyrical art with “Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love,” the first retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the artist’s career, on view in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art through January 18, 2027.
For over 60 years, Suzanne Jackson (born 1944) has painted with light, color, and emotion, creating works shaped by her deep respect for nature and her belief that all living things are connected. Her journey began in the late 1960s, when she emerged as a central figure of the African American art scene in Los Angeles — and it never slowed down. A dancer, poet, teacher, and theater designer as well, Jackson poured every bit of that creative energy into her visual art.
Visitors will discover more than 60 paintings and drawings: from her early dreamlike compositions, layered with luminous washes of pigment and imagery drawn from her own dreams, to studies of leaves, trees, and mountains inspired by the California landscape, to her boldest recent works — paint suspended in midair, moving off the wall to dance with light and space.
The exhibition, co-organized with the Walker Art Center and SFMOMA, invites you to see beauty as an act of care — Jackson herself has said that it is “political to make an artwork about peace and beauty.” And the celebration continues on Friday, December 4, when MFA First Fridays honors the show with art making, Spotlight Talks, and music by Baby Indiglo.
Don’t miss this long-overdue tribute to an artist who reminds us that love — for nature, for art, for one another — is what connects us all.
Photo: MFA Boston — Suzanne Jackson, Wind and Water (detail), 1975; © Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York.
