A CONSTELLATION OF BLACKNESS
Veronica Jackson
September 13 – October 27, 2024
The Visual Arts Center of Richmond presents A CONSTELLATION OF BLACKNESS, a multi-media exhibition of work by Veronica Jackson and co-curated with Julia Chance.
Inspired by Jackson’s lived experience and archival research, A CONSTELLATION OF BLACKNESS addresses notions of invisibility, hypervisibility, devaluation, and triumph experienced by Black women in America. She employs printmaking, typography, and vintage photographs to create a series of striking installations that speak to past and present times.
-
A conversation with Veronica Jackson
Ahead of her exhibition opening, we spoke with Visiting Artist-in-Residence Veronica Jackson to learn about the work she created in our glass and printmaking studios.
Read more -
“At my core, I am a public historian. One of the foundations of my practice is to educate the public. With this exhibition, I want visitors to see a beautiful array of Black women who they know little to nothing about, to glean their understated power, and be curious enough to learn more about their historic activism that is still relevant today.”
—Veronica Jackson
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Veronica Jackson’s background encompasses the critical examination of visual culture. As an artist, she records, interprets, and makes aware the complexities in which humans exist and affect their social surroundings. As a recovering architect and interpretive designer, she creatively solves problems within virtual and built environments.Her visual art practice is a combination of past professional disciplines, present lived experiences, and an accumulation of contemporary and historic research. Jackson’s initial and ongoing project—The Burden of Invisibility—physically manifests her evolution from designer to conceptual artist. Her body of work is text-based, autobiographical, and in response to her gendered and racialized existence in America—with a special focus on the portrayal, perception, and legacy of Black women in popular media.
Jackson attended her first artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI), NM in 2017. She has engaged in many residencies since at Ali Youssefi Project WAL/Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA in 2021; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, VA and Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History, Danville, VA in 2020; and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY and another invitation to SFAI in 2022. Upcoming is the exhibiting artist residency and accompanying solo exhibition at Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA in 2024.
Jackson has exhibited in group and solo shows including NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, NYC; Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA; FLOW Art Festival, Chroma Projects, McGuffey Art Center, and Piedmont Virginia Community College, all in Charlottesville, VA; 536 Gallery/Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History, Danville, VA; The Arts Center in Orange, Orange, VA; Bower Center for the Arts, Bedford, VA; and Riverviews Artspace, Lynchburg, VA. She is in the collection of private individuals, the Virginia Humanities, Charlottesville, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
In 2016 Jackson graduated with an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from CCA, San Francisco. She currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Central Virginia.
About the curator
Julia Chance is a journalist whose writing has appeared in national consumer and trade publications and on digital platforms. She created exhibit text for Patrick Kelly: A Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and contributed to the exhibition catalogue DoubleConsciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970. Chance is also the author of Sisterfriends: Portraits of Sisterly Love, a photo-essay book celebrating sisterhood. As the Communications Specialist at The Art League in Alexandria, Virginia, she spreads the word about the organization’s many exhibitions, art classes and events.