Interview of Suzanne Jackson

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1992

MASON:: Could you tell us, when and where were you born?

JACKSON:: I was born January 30, 1944—that was a Sunday—at eight [o'clock] P.M. in St. Louis, Missouri. My parents moved from St. Louis when I was nine months old. My first memory is my grandfather [Oscar F. Butler] being very tall. But that's because I was a baby. It turns out he wasn't that tall.

MASON:: This was your mother's or your—?

JACKSON:: My mother's father.

MASON:: What were the names of your parents?

JACKSON:: My mother is Ann-Marie—[adopts French pronunciation] Ann-Marie, actually—Jackson. Butler is her family name. And my father was Roy Dedrick Jackson. That's his adopted name. He was actually—Smith was his real father, and his family was a Harvey family in St. Louis. I go through all of that because I think the background of both of my parents' families is complicated. There are a lot of cultures, which is something I would like to investigate eventually.

MASON:: Your mother seems to—I mean, that's a French, probably Creole, name. I mean Ann-Marie.

JACKSON:: Indian. Both her parents were half Indian and Scottish-Irish. My grandmother's maiden name was Terry, Margaret Bell Terry [Butler]. And from what I understand, her mother was Indian, and she had five daughters. Supposedly she'd had several sons by the man she was—I guess she had been a slave woman, and she'd had several sons, and the man who owned her set her free after she had all these sons. And then she married a black man, Egyptian from what I understand, I'm not sure—I have to check all of these things—who was a music teacher. She had five daughters, and my grandmother was one of them. And my grandmother married my grandfather, whose family was from—my grandmother's family was from Hannibal, Missouri. I think that's the town that Mark Twain came from. They lived there at the same time. And my grandfather was from Tennessee. He was born probably on Lookout Mountain, which is just outside of Chattanooga. At that time it was Indian land. And his mother was Scottish-Irish. Her name was Annie Anderson Butler. And Marian Anderson is the family with Brown, Butler, Anderson families there. And Marian Anderson was my grandfather's niece.

MASON:: The famous singer.

JACKSON:: Yes, and I have never met her. I would have loved to have met her. So both my grandparents were part Indian on my mother's side and Irish and some French Creole in there somewhere. So it's a combination of a bunch of things, I think.

MASON:: Were there any sort of Indian traditions in your family at all?

JACKSON:: Yes. And I think I received them from my grandfather. Last year I was doing some research by accident on Appalachian country and states, through Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, and we had recognized some of the expressions or traditions of cooking and sayings that sort of passed through in our family, from my mother, anyway. These are some of the things that I'm now in the process—now that I have reached this point in my life and I have a different kind of time and control of my life just to write the book, at one point I really wanted—the next book that I was supposed to write was about a black and Indian woman. And as it is now, everybody has been going into making these combinations and relationships in their lives. That was something I wanted to do ten years ago. I think that Alice Walker has dealt with it quite a bit. And a lot of people are beginning to talk about the combinations that we are as black people in this country.

MASON:: Yeah. I think of Daughters of the Dust, at the end, where the black daughter runs off with the Indian.

JACKSON:: Yeah, yeah. My father's family I don't know as much about. His mother [Minnie Harvey Jackson] died when he was eight years old. I think I look more like my father's mother. This is what I'm realizing from old photos that I have seen of her. My father was an adventurer. And when he moved me and my mother to California it was because he wanted—well, my father was the first black—"colored"—milkman in St. Louis, at Pevely Dairy, and as a result he became a teamster, and they gave him a horse and a wagon.

MASON:: I'm surprised they let him join.

JACKSON:: Well, he was very fair, that's the reason. A lot of people didn't know what my father was. He looked sort of Spanish or Italian or Middle Eastern; he was that kind of combination. So people from all sorts of nationalities would walk up to my father and start speaking to him at different times. [laughs] And he became a thirty-third-degree Mason. And when we moved back from [Fairbanks] Alaska, they gave him a tour of the Masonic lodge here up on Nob Hill in San Francisco in the sixties and they didn't allow any black people in there. But they didn't know what he was. But he was the highest degree of Mason he could be, so they gave him the big tour not realizing he was a black man. But when he became a milkman in St. Louis, they gave him a horse and a wagon, and they put him in the black neighborhood where a lot of people owed bills and hadn't paid the bills in a long time. And the advantage he had was that the horse knew where to stop. So when he got into the wagon with the horse—they gave all the white people trucks, and they gave him this horse and wagon, and the horse stopped at every place he was supposed to stop. And because he was black, he began to collect the money from the people in the neighborhood. He also had a very nice manner about him. So I think people had a great deal of respect for him, so they paid their bills. And he ended up building up the route. But then he decided, I guess, that he wanted a different life, or wanted to do something else, or didn't want to stay in St. Louis, so that's when he moved to California. And that was 1944, so that was just before the [Second World] War ended. And I guess there were jobs—they moved to San Francisco. And my father was working at Hunter's Point. And I didn't know until—Hunter's Point is right over here on the stretch out on the water. When you go across the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] you'll see cranes, large cranes, not on this Oakland side but across the bay.

MASON:: Okay.

JACKSON:: It's a point that's there first. You go around the curb, and there is Candlestick Park, where the ballpark is. And I didn't know until my father died that he was an electrician there at Hunter's Point. And my mother's two younger brothers [Norris Butler and Vernon Butler] were stationed at Treasure Island in the navy. So that was part of their reason for coming to California, because my mother's brothers were here, and then there was the opportunity. A lot of people migrated in 1944 to the West Coast for better jobs.

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: But when black people moved to California they were segregated. They put most of the black people over in the Bay View district, and a lot of them lived in the Fillmore area.

MASON:: Where did you live, your family?

JACKSON:: We lived in the Bay View district. And there was a lot of leftover sort of army and navy housing which were called the projects eventually. But a lot of people lived very well. The women were working at a lot of the garment districts, at Lilli Ann and Koret of California. And the men had jobs, you know, in the war kinds of jobs that were there. So people had money. And also at that time, I remember where we lived they also provided linens and dishes and furniture. All those things were provided when you moved into the housing projects.

MASON:: Wow.

JACKSON:: And there were gardens. It was like a community where they were—the one place that we lived on Donner Avenue, the houses were all set in kind of a square, and there were court houses, lower houses, bungalows, in the center. So it was almost like a community, a family neighborhood.

MASON:: Yeah. It sounds like an African village.

JACKSON:: It was like that in a way. So all the kids played in the neighborhood together in the area, and parents sort of watched and baby-sat. My mother was fussy, and I wasn't able to go down to play. I had to stay upstairs and play. I was very small, and she was just really very protective. And then we moved to Paul Avenue from there, which is over on that sort of center off Third Street. I went to Bret Harte School. I started at Bret Harte in San Francisco. I was thinking about it today: I must have been rather an eccentric child or something, a little bit strange or something different from the other kids, because I remember—I was thinking about it today. There were some twins who used to sort of tease and beat up on everybody. They even beat up all the boys.

MASON:: Big girls?

JACKSON:: Yeah. They were really tough kids. Well, as a baby at home, just—my mother listened to soap operas a lot. I remember it was Stella Dallas and Helen Trent and all of that. She stayed home doing housework and ironing. But when she was busy at home she would have me write to my grandmother or draw pictures. So that's when I was maybe a year old or so. I remember that experience first. And then I guess the next experience that I had was starting school, kindergarten, and evidently being one of the students who—the bizarre thing that I remember now, this is the year I remember doing a painting of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Can you believe that? You know, Columbus, right? And they put them up on display. And I did some other paintings. My mother kept all these paintings. They are in some scrapbooks that are in Los Angeles right now of a lot of early painting that I did in kindergarten and at school. I remember it just being an absolute pleasure to paint. I would always draw at home with crayons. I had crayons and books and things. But probably that was the biggest, messiest painting experience. And finger painting. We used to do a lot of finger painting, and that was kind of wonderful, I remember that. Just getting your hands into it. And also making—it's funny I'm remembering all this stuff now—a clay dish. And I think we pressed our hands into that dish.

MASON:: I remember doing a project like that.

JACKSON:: Yeah. It was all those things that they give you in K [kindergarten], one [first grade] to two [second grade]. When I started teaching first through second grade they give you these books that tell you what to teach in art classes. Of course, I did some different things, though, just because I wasn't trained to be a teacher. So we had to kind of work from our own devices. But those things were really special to me. And then right after that, I remember it was almost immediately, my father must have left to go to Alaska then. I guess he announced to my mother one day that he was going to go to Guam, and she said, "I'd rather have you go to Alaska than go to Guam." She was just teasing, and then three weeks later he came home and said, "Well, guess what? I'm going to Alaska." I don't remember exactly what year it was. I must have been about seven. I studied piano, and I remember while my father was in Alaska I would go catch the bus on Third Street and go down to Sherman Clay [piano store] to my piano lessons. And Mr. Campbell was my piano teacher.

MASON:: So you were just trained from early on, then, to do a lot of solitary activities?

JACKSON:: Well, as an only child you just—

MASON:: You couldn't go out to play, either.

JACKSON:: The kids who were the neighbors—we lived on the second floor, so the kids who were the neighbors who lived next door, the Williams family, they sort of came across to play with me. I didn't eat. And I think at the time my mother just didn't realize that I was a very small child and I was never hungry. I'm still not hungry most of the time. I eat little things at a time, little things all day long. So I would be made to sit at the table and eat from breakfast until lunch to finish the food on my plate, and I just wasn't hungry. That's what I realized later on; there was only a certain amount I needed to eat. So my parents bought me a table and chairs and a little electric stove and my own little pot and pans so I could heat my own food, my own dinner. That was an incentive for me to eat. And it worked a little bit. Then some friends would come over and they would eat with me. You know, little kids would come.

MASON:: Tea party.

JACKSON:: We'd have little parties and things. But it's kind of a spoiled way to grow up in a sense. But it sort of works on the imagination. You sort of have these little friends who come and visit that you talk to and play with and write stories and draw pictures. And listening to the radio was very important, I think, in my life.

MASON:: What kind of programs did you listen to?

JACKSON:: Well, especially, as I was mentioning, my mother listened to those soap operas all day long. Most housewives did in those days. And music. But then, when we moved to Alaska there was no television, so all the stories, all the early programs, everything from The Lone Ranger—there were Saturday morning programs for children with music. And I think that one of my favorite songs is "Teddy Bears Picnic," which is very funny. It was a theme song for a program that was on. And then later I guess what would be almost the equivalent of Masterpiece Theater came on the radio. But mostly all those adventure stories that were in the late 1940s and 1950s, Amos and Andy, and the fights—the Joe Louis fights. And everybody crowded around the radio. And then, later, Fairbanks did get a television station, but one, and it would come on sometimes, and it would be test patterns in black and white. I don't know if you're familiar with test patterns. You're probably too young.

MASON:: No, I remember them.

JACKSON:: They are black and white with graphics that would come out of them. They were kind of interesting patterns that would stay on the television screen when there was no programming. Those were kind of fun. They would be like pop art. So that kind of thing would be on television. And then, because the station was local, a lot of local people would be on television doing things, doing exercises, or doing 4-H programs, that kind of thing, including me.

MASON:: Oh, what did you do?

JACKSON:: I was there I think the first time helping to demonstrate some exercises. And then as a younger person my first experience was in camp cookery and forestry in 4-H, doing some demonstrations of that kind. But I sort of jumped ahead in a sense. When my father went up to Alaska, I really missed him a lot. And, you know, he was gone, and so—I think one of the times I was sitting watching television—and I realized later, I think I probably realized—because my father and I used to do a lot of things together. He drove the buses in San Francisco after the war was over. He drove the buses, he drove the cable cars, the trolley cars. And I was thinking about it the other day, I was thinking how people in the South had to sit in the back of the bus. Because this woman was commenting on the bus, about how when we had to sit in the back of the bus we didn't want to, and now that we have the option of sitting in the front, everybody goes to the back. And I was thinking about how I never had to worry about sitting in the back of the bus because my father was the bus driver. So I would go along with him. He used to take me to Golden Gate Park and to the opera house, and he just took me around to a lot of places. But my mother stayed home all the time. So when my father left to go to Alaska, my mother didn't go out, so I was always in. And I realized that I was sitting watching television, watching Chef Boyardee and watching Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, all those programs they had on television in those days. And I think I was probably—and I hate to use the word bored—but I think I was bored. You don't realize these things of what's going on until later on in life when you look back and you see what it was. Because my mother stayed in, and my father dragged me around all over the place. I really missed him. He finally sent for us to come up to Alaska to visit, to see if we'd like it and what it would be like. He rented a one-room cabin, which was sort of the norm then. It was very expensive. It was like $100 a month for this one-room cabin. That doesn't sound like much now, but in the fifties that was a lot of money to pay for rent. Especially with no running water. And there was no bathroom, no toilet. There was an outhouse, but my father used that, and we had a chamber pot. [laughs] On one end of the cabin was a kitchen with a sink, but my father put a drain in so that it would drain out. He dug a trench around the house, outside the cabin, so the water would drain outside. And then we had a hole, a square hole cut in the ground that was the refrigerator. Because where we lived in Alaska, in Fairbanks, was about two hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. So usually, even in the summertime when it gets up to 110 [degrees] in the shade, if you dig down deep enough, about six feet, there's permafrost. The ground doesn't thaw out. So our refrigerator was actually this hole that was cut in the earth, and then we had a wooden lid on it, and then it would be covered with snow to keep animals out. Then in the middle of the cabin was the dinner table. There was a big stove that was really a heating stove, but my mother would cook the most incredible pies on that stove. There must have been an opening, or we had a—oh, I think we even had a reflector oven. It's what you set on top. It's like a square can, because we used it for camping. You set this reflector oven on top of the heating stove, and then you can heat the food. And she made incredible pies in that reflector oven. Then at the other end was the bed and the dresser. One night I woke up and my mother and father were both—my mother was standing on the dresser and my father was on the bed, and there was a mouse in the house, [laughs] It was hysterical; it was really funny. But I remember my parents laughed a lot then. I really remember it was like a month or two months that was really fun. It was fun for me. I loved it. And I had a puppy named Toby and I had a turtle.

MASON:: So this was just one cabin out in the woods? It sounds isolated.

JACKSON:: It was just one cabin that was on Twenty-sixth Street in Fairbanks. As it turned out, Twenty-sixth Street was kind of a black community. It was property that—in Alaska at that time you could homestead land. If you turned over the land with a tractor and you put a cabin or a structure on it, and then you paid $25 for the filing fee, it was your property. So my father homesteaded a lot of property like that, and we had property at Harding Lake. And later, after that visit, when we came back, my father actually bought a house on Seventeenth Avenue. But that was really fun. I laughed—it took us three weeks to get back to the States. Alaska was a territory then. And our car broke down in a remote area of Canada, and my father had to sort of hitchhike. He waited until a big truck came along, and they went away to a place to try to get help. My mother and I stayed in the car. It was one of those big old Buicks, a 1949 Buick. It sits up real high. And these wolves came out of the woods. And at the time we didn't know that wolves were really tame and they don't bother you. They kind of inspected the car; they walked around the car.

MASON:: Oh, really? [laughs]

JACKSON:: No, they're really tame and very civilized. They're more civilized than human beings. They have families.

MASON:: I've never met one face to face.

JACKSON:: Yeah. But they were big, and they were really scary looking while my mother and I were in the car waiting. They did kind of sniff around, and they peed on the tires, and they went away. Then my father came back with an Indian man named Yocum, who lived on a farm in Great Falls, Montana. So he put our car into his van, his big freight van, and we sort of had to go along with him and another guy. We had two trucks. My mother and I rode in one truck and my father rode in another. And I had the turtle, and I had the dog j with me. And the problem with the poor turtle was that there was no water we could put him in, because the water had too many minerals in it up there. Unless you had fresh water, bottled water. So the turtle died along the way. The dog ate all of the—we had some great big slices of ham from the military base. My father had a friend who was a sergeant at the PX, and he bought some big slices of ham that were huge. They were like twelve inches and probably about an inch thick. And the dog, staying in the car one night, ate all the ham. He got out and his sides were all hanging out. MASON; Oh, God. I know he was so sick.

JACKSON:: He was a mess, that poor dog. And then he fell over the side of the road, and my father had to hang in the top of a tree and save him over the side of the cliff, you know, hanging out over the cliff. And then we finally got to San Francisco, and the dog had to use the toilet. We were on the freeway at Army Street in the rush hour with the dog having to, you know—it was a mess. He was an awful little dog, but he was wonderful. I loved Toby. And that was our trip back. It took us about three weeks to get back from Alaska to San Francisco. And then my father went back to Alaska, and I missed him again. And he bought the house. He bought a house for I think $6,500.

MASON:: So he just planned to go up there, work, and come back?

JACKSON:: He was planning just to come back, yeah. And as it turned out, because he was making really good money, and the standard of living at that time—what we pay for a quart of milk or half a gallon of milk now or a loaf of bread now is what we were paying in the 1950s. So imagine paying a $1.50 for a loaf of bread or $2.00 for a loaf of bread or $1.50 for a quart of milk. The electric bill was about $150 a month in the fifties. You know, that was a lot of money. But the income was relative to that.

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: The difficulty was that when it was time for me to go to college, on the average, across the board, in the United States, it meant my father's income was too high for me to get scholarships, even though it wasn't really.

MASON:: Plus he owned all this property, too. That must have hurt.

JACKSON:: Well, it was different, because it was sort of homesteaded land. I don't know. You know, maybe I didn't know what was really going on as well. That probably did figure into it. They do consider assets and all that, don't they. I was only sixteen when I left to go to college, so I just didn't know a lot of anything.

MASON:: Does your family still own that land there?

JACKSON:: No. That's a complication, too. When my mother—my mother decided when it was time for me to go to college that—I had a scholarship to go to Carnegie [Mellon University]. We actually sent a whole painting out to be reviewed, because there were no slides then. We didn't know what to do or how to do it, but they wanted to see an example of artwork. So we sent a painting and some drawings, maybe, that I had to Carnegie, and I was accepted. I had scholarships. But my mother said she didn't want to live in Pittsburgh. And I didn't know at the time that your parents didn't go to college with you. [laughs] And you also didn't talk back to your parents and tell them, "Well, no, I want to go and you have to stay home." It just was unheard of. It just wasn't the way. I had no idea. So it wasn't until later when it hit me—I think it was when I went back to graduate school I realized—I was going back to graduate school in mid-life—that I probably wouldn't have gone through that experience. I don't think I missed anything. I think I learned a lot of other things as a result of just going through life and having to have life experiences as opposed to that kind of college experience. But I really loved my life growing up in Alaska, because people were very close to nature, and people who lived in Alaska loved it for what it was. I mean, you really had to survive there, and life was not necessarily easy. In Fairbanks, especially, the temperatures could go down as low as 72, 74 degrees below [zero] in the winter. The average was usually about 50 to 60 below in the wintertime. When it would go down to 26 below everybody would run out in their T-shirts. That was considered really warm. Then in the summer it would be anywhere from 90 to 110 in the shade. So it was good. I was in 4-H. My first project was forestry and camp cookery. And then I was in clothing, and I actually—over the years in 4-H you sort of progress. You learn a lot of organization and keeping records. And the standard is pretty high as far as the quality of what the final project is that you do. You set goals for yourself. So by the time I was a teenager in clothing, I actually won a trip to Chicago for the National 4-H Club [Foundation of America] Congress. What they do is they have local competitions in bread baking and cherry pie making and automotive, and if you have animals those kind of projects. And then you win on the local level and then you win competitions on the state level. Then, if you win the state level, they send you to Chicago for the National 4-H Club Congress. So I was the first black person to go to National 4-H Club Congress. And there was a lot of controversy that the people from the southern states were not going to go if I was going to be there.

MASON:: The entire South was going to stay home? [laughs]

JACKSON:: Yeah. It was really a stupid thing, because what young person is going to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because one person is going to be there? Well, as it turned out, they took us through—we were there around Thanksgiving time, so we each stayed. They put us on a farm. I stayed on a farm in Northfield, Minnesota, where the family's name was Schwake. And the interesting thing about that is that one of my students later knew that family. It's like the generation now would be the grandchildren of that family. And then my best friend [Sharon Rogers]'s mother used to date one of the Schwakes.

MASON:: Wow.

JACKSON:: So it's like going around the country and then finally running into all these people who were from Northfield, Minnesota. And I was sixteen.

MASON:: Must be some kind of karma or something.

JACKSON:: Yeah. So when I finally got to the National 4-H Club Congress, though—because they made us wear Eskimo parkas, which we never wore. I always wore a wool coat in Alaska. Everybody thought I was an Eskimo, because they just couldn't imagine a black person coming from Alaska, anyway, and they just didn't know. A guy came up to me in an elevator and said, "I'm from Texas, and anytime you want to come and visit me on my ranch you can come and visit me," and I couldn't figure out what that was all about. They had written an article in the newspaper saying that I was there and that a lot of people had threatened not to come from Mississippi. As it turned out it was Arizona which was the state that made the most controversy. [Barry M. J Goldwater state. The people from the South were fun. We all had fun exchanging "you guys" and "y'all." I know it sounds so corny all this stuff, but in the 1950s and early 1960s it would probably be the equivalent now—in that form and in that time—there is so much more depth to it now, and more of an understanding of kind of a multicultural thing that's going on, I think, with younger people. Then it was still "them and us." And you still went home to your own culture and your own lifestyle. In fact, the way my mother cooked her string beans at home was something that was what "colored" people did at home. But you didn't talk about it when you went out. As it turned out, I think that probably my upbringing was more privileged than some of the white kids that I was growing up with. Because I remember one girl being surprised that we had turkey, and it wasn't Christmas or Thanksgiving. We just had turkey at home for a Sunday meal. And that was just the way it was. And there was only one of me. My father usually worked—he started working as a real estate broker, so he had a real estate business at home, and my mother and I sort of helped him with that. And then he worked for a bakery doing wholesale sales and delivery to the military bases. So he would drive—for example on a Monday, he'd leave at five o'clock in the morning and drive two or three hundred miles down to Fort Greeley. That's where the white buffalo lived. Down in that area it's like a junction between north and south, where you go from Fairbanks down to Anchorage. And he ran over a mink, which became a little collar for me on a jacket. That's the kind of life, basically. Everything was just really wild and very natural. I remember one man who came from out of the bush, came in with something like $20,000 or $30,000 one weekend, and bought a house. Because the men who lived up in the bush didn't have anything to do with their money except gamble it away. So he came out and bought the house. And my father had to go out of town, so I carried the money in a paper bag down to the bank. And I was just little; I was probably ten. But along the way there was a horse on a ranch, and there were berries and rose hips and all kinds of wildflowers. Because we lived on Seventeenth Avenue, then to walk into town was seventeen blocks really. But it was a mixture. Just here in Oakland, I took a 98 bus, and there was a community sort of between the [Oakland-Alameda County] Coliseum and the airport. I think it's a heavy drug community. But the houses were all neat little houses with little yards and gardens, and it's a whole black community. It sort of reminded me in some ways of areas of Fairbanks, because there were small, neat houses with little yards around them, some of them. But not as country as it was when I was growing up. And I know that that affected me.

MASON:: So you were making art around the natural things?

JACKSON:: Yeah. My first art lessons were when I was in the seventh grade. I was twelve. We had a woman come in just to have art class. And we drew from National Geographic magazine; we copied it with watercolor. And photographs of birds. We copied other people's paintings. A lot of those Navajo Indian paintings, we copied those things.

MASON:: Those sound like some complex projects from National Geographic.

JACKSON:: We were just given—we'd choose a photograph and decide that that was what we wanted to paint. That was the way she taught us to paint. It was to copy from the photographs or from things that we saw. And then later on—I think, it was part of a 4-H project—I was collecting wildflowers and plants and pressing them in a book and using—actually it was a big watercolor book. And now that I realize, it was very good watercolor paper that I was pressing these plants on. And what I would do—for the cover I made a picture—I don't remember if it was Mount McKinley or whether it was just the mountains outside. Fairbanks sits in a valley, and all around that valley are mountains, the Tanana Valley. I believe it's either just at sea level or like four hundred feet above sea level. So from wherever you stand you look all around and you see these huge mountains. You don't realize how huge they are, but they're really big mountains, because they're far away, actually. Because the mountains in Alaska are very, very high mountains, the range is. And sometimes in the winter, when the caribou—mostly the moose. When the moose didn't have enough to eat they'd come roaming right into town. So we had some moose that were across the street in the big field from us. My mother and I were really stupid. Not realizing that moose don't eat meat, we ran out and threw some steaks out in the snow to these two moose that were out there. [laughs] We were really dumb. We couldn't figure out why they were not interested in the steaks we threw out there. And probably in the springtime, when it thawed out, some other animal or dog probably came along and had some great steaks for a meal. And the Eskimos and the Indians were still very much indigenous people within their own culture. They still hand made things. They still hand made their snowshoes.

MASON:: Was there a lot of interaction between the black community and the Indians and the Eskimos?

JACKSON:: Well, there weren't that—it's like the black community was small in a way. When I became a teenager, that's when I really got to meet the black people. You know, the kids in the black community all sort of mixed. A lot of the kids were with military families. And because I was going to a private school as opposed to the public school, there were only two of us in that school. And occasionally [there were] some black military students who'd come through. The other girl [Theressa Coleman] was in my class and she had a sister who was a number of years behind us in elementary school. So it wasn't until we became teenagers that we sort of interacted with the other black kids in the community. There were more black students by then. Everybody mixed. Basically because the survival is intense, people dealt more—and I've heard this recently. I thought it was just me, but—where people tended to treat you—you received respect according to what you did and how you dealt with the rest of the community. Our next-door neighbor [Joe Marshall] became the mayor of the town. One of my schoolmates' fathers was mayor of the town. He wasn't black. But it was just that the community was so small that everybody in the community had to deal with the issues of how you will survive in this environment. If you had ideas, then they were respected. People didn't tolerate overt racism. Although the girl [Theressa Coleman] who was in my class, her mother was always out picketing, she was like a one-women picket. She was picketing—

MASON:: What was she picketing?

JACKSON:: Well, what I realized as I became older was that this women probably came from a Garveyite family at one point. I mean, she was basically preaching Garvey, or she found racism just about everywhere. Her name was Beatrice Coleman. They called her "old B. Coleman." My mother thought her name was O. B. Coleman, but it was people calling her "old B. Coleman." [laughs] Anyway, she would be out there picketing. I remember even in class—Theressa and I would be a little embarrassed. She would get upset. First of all, the history books had Toussaint L'Ouverture, they had Crispus Attucks, maybe, and—who else would be in a history book? So when we would get through the history, Theressa usually would slam the book closed there in the classroom, and everybody would look at her and go like, "Well, what's wrong with her?" It was because they [the Colemans] were more aware of what was not there in the history books. And I have a feeling that in the school that I was in, because it was a Jesuit-run school, they probably gave us a little more history than most people did. But there wasn't much there, or the facts are always very limited according to—and now I go back—I still have some of my old textbooks. There was a little more than perhaps was in the public school. We memorized James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes poems as part of the curriculum.

MASON:: That's incredible. When I went to high school it was just like blacks were slaves. [laughs]

JACKSON:: Yeah. Well, that was the thing. I remember her slamming the book one time when we were talking about blacks being slaves. But it was a reality that was there, and it was the truth of that history. But she'd just get mad because it would be there in the book. But as it turned out, we memorized a lot of things, because there weren't any Xerox machines. There were some mimeograph machines. I learned to draw on mimeograph sheets for the school newspapers and for the yearbooks. Actually, I have a couple of yearbooks up there, too. So that was part of it. I worked as the art editor on the school newspaper. If you know how to draw, then people are always asking you to do things.

MASON:: Were you able to learn anything about publishing or layout and design and things like that?

JACKSON:: Well, as much as you could learn with a mimeograph sheet. Do you know what mimeograph is?

MASON:: Isn't it that purple stuff?

JACKSON:: Yeah. You had to put the little holes on the machine, and then you hand pumped it through, hand rolled it through. That's how we published our school newspaper.

MASON:: So it was just one sheet?

JACKSON:: It was two or three sheets. It was very extravagant. [laughs] And then, later on, I think we were able to do photographs on the mimeograph machine. I don't remember how we did that. That's why some of the stuff I have—I'll dig it out. Some of the stuff is in Los Angeles right now.

MASON:: Your yearbook must have been more complicated.

JACKSON:: Yeah. The yearbooks later, as I got into high school, we sent out to Josten Publishing, of course. The drawing is a kind of crude drawing. I did the map of Alaska, and we did inserts. And all the little medallions and things that went through were all done by hand. Basically I taught myself to draw. My father gave me an oil painting set when I was sixteen. It was a beautiful box. And that was stolen from the back of a car when I was about twenty-one. He gave me brushes and the paint. When I was sixteen it was like this—well, I was a dancer then. I started dancing when I was twelve because I wanted to go to the "Y" dance. When you got to be in seventh and eighth grade they had these "Y" dances on the weekend, the YMCA [Young Men's Christian Association]. And the kids from the public school went. At that time our parents drove us there and dropped us off and picked us up. You didn't have dates. And if you had a date with a boy, his parents probably drove you there and dropped you off and that kind of thing. But that didn't really happen. I don't think that happened very often. I had an allowance of $2.50 a week, and I decided that I wanted to take dance class, ballroom dance lessons. There were a number of us who were all in that class. And at the end of the period of time that you took these lessons they had a party. And you had to practice all your steps, like the samba and the waltz and the mambo and the cha-cha and all those things. But when you got to the "Y" dance, nobody knew how to do any of those dances. [laughs] All they'd do is drag you around the floor on one foot, one leg. You put one arm over the shoulder and one arm behind the back, and the boys kind of dragged you across the floor.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO AUGUST 12, 1992

JACKSON:: The difference was that was the "Y" dances, and it was basically the white kids', the white peoples' music. It was like American Bandstand music. And when I met a lot of the black students, some of the kids were from Philly [Philadelphia]. There were a couple of guys who had come up because their parents were in the service. So they were in the public school. And there were a couple of really young GIs who were seventeen and eighteen. And usually GIs were taboo, but because these guys were so young—they proved themselves to be very nice. They were hanging out with some of the other kids, and we all got to know them. Either their parents were in the military, or if they were in the military themselves and they proved to be really nice guys and they were really young, then they could sort of hang out with everybody. They came with records from Philly—the madison and the slop. So the black music was completely different from the white music. So if you had a party—it's like I had a party, I remember, one summer, and I had all the wrong music. So somebody ran home and brought back the right music.

MASON:: [laughs] The Philadelphia sound.

JACKSON:: Yeah, it's like Philly and Detroit. Then the party was really a good party.

MASON:: Did you like the black music?

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah. Of course, the parties were better. They were more fun. We had a really huge yard. My father built a deck out in the back. We had a table with an umbrella and all that. It sounds very fancy, but it was a really nice patio table with a nice little umbrella, and the deck was very plain in the backyard, that kind of thing. So we could dance on the deck and have the parties in the backyard. When I looked at some the photos from then—oh, there is a scrapbook that is in L.A., too. Maybe somehow I'm going to get to Los Angeles so you could coordinate some of these things with it, because that would be really fun to see those. And I found out how I really didn't like the fifties, because you had to wear gloves, and you wore long-line bras and all these structures and stuff. But the clothes were really pretty. It's like in the summertime you would wear pretty dresses. In springtime—so you have seasonal clothes. And I think since we were so wrapped up in the wintertime, it was just nice to have some pretty clothes to wear in the summer and all that. So everybody dressed up. The boys wore suits with narrow, skinny ties, or they wore a real nice sweater. I mean, it's just the kind of time where now, for example, my son wouldn't be caught dead wearing all that stuff. They have a different kind of clothes which are kind of neat and fun. That was really kind of an opening as well. And at the time I was still dancing. What had happened by then was that after I finished the ballroom dance lessons I started taking a ballet class with my $2.50 allowance. I did a lot with that. I think I started with the $2.50 when I was nine or ten [years old] collecting stamps. And at one point stamp collecting became very expensive, and I had to write a letter to them telling them it was beyond my financial means and I couldn't continue. But I really did acquire a really good stamp collection. But then it evolved into dance class. I start dancing, taking classes at twelve. Then at thirteen they had a dance company [Pastel Dance Company], and I was working at the dance company. So we danced for a lot of the Miss Alaska pageants and for a lot of the private clubs.

MASON:: It was a dance company for young people? Or was it mixed?

JACKSON:: It was a mixed company. Actually, Suzy Marlin, who married one of the Crosbys—her husband [Lindsay Crosby] just committed suicide last year or so. She was a runner-up for Miss America. And she'd worked for Wein Alaska Airlines. She was one of the dancers in the company, she and her sister. And then my dance partner, he was a ballet dancer who'd come from Corvallis, Oregon. His name was Dennis Lynch. We did a lot of partner work together. And a guy named Fred Gokel, who'd come from the East Coast, New York, and another woman, she'd been with Radio City Music Hall—it's incredible the people who would come to Alaska, and the quality. For example, Andre Previn, when he was really young, was there, and—oh, wait. Who's the black piano player?

MASON:: Watts? JACKSON Andre Watts. He was there. Incredible artists would come to Fairbanks, especially, because at that time the only university in the state was in Fairbanks, the University of Alaska. So in a sense it was like—

MASON:: Is that were you took the lessons, at the university? Do they have like a performance center section?

JACKSON:: No, there was actually one woman who had started—she bought the dance company that was there. It was like a recital dance school, a regular dance school. She bought the company. Her name was Jimilie Pastel. She was from Burbank [California] and she had worked with a lot of the—actually, some of the nuns who taught at my school had worked with some of the "Mouseketeers" and the "Burbank-Hollywood kids." So she started a company there, and it was just on a different level. It was more professional. So the kind of dancing that we did—there were very good dancers. As a result, a number of us came out to the States and actually worked professionally as dancers. Good training.

MASON:: Did she weed people out then?

JACKSON:: No, basically the training was good, so everybody pretty much participated. We had a good company going. And then when I started working doing a lot of partner work with Dennis, that really sort of changed the company. It was just the people who came into the company and had to dance. If you dance, you have to dance, and there is just nothing you can do about it. So the level goes up according to the people who come into the company.

MASON:: Was she teaching a particular technique?

JACKSON:: Basically ballet, you know, classical ballet. And I don't even remember at the time—it wasn't until I came out to California and my mother had heard—when I came out to go to college, originally I was going to go to San Francisco College for Women, which is Lone Mountain, which is up above USF [University of San Francisco]. That was a very, very private—it was so private that not many people knew about it. Except the year I came out one of the women—they used to have this thing in Glamour or Seventeen magazine where from each college they chose a woman who was the best dressed or something like that. That was real dippy.

MASON:: Well, they still have it today.

JACKSON:: Do they still do that?

MASON:: They're not the best dressed, they're the career women of the school.

JACKSON:: It was probably academic and well dressed. I think it was probably academic.

MASON:: Well, they cut out the well dressed.

JACKSON:: And Lone Mountain, I think, that year won. But I was late, somehow we were late, getting here, and I ended up registering for a graduate class in aesthetics.

MASON:: Was this a feminist college?

JACKSON:: It was a women's college.

MASON:: But did it have a feminist—?

JACKSON:: There was no such thing as feminist. [laughs] It was a women's college. No, basically it was a college that was like a finishing school for women who really were very well off.

MASON:: Sort of like Wellesley [College]?

JACKSON:: Yeah, it was in that line of all those old-line women's colleges, except it was on the West Coast. There were two other black women there when I arrived; they were Rosalind [Williams] and Stephanie [Williams]. Their mother had graduated from the school back in 1949 or something like that. But as a freshman taking a graduate class in aesthetics, because I couldn't get into classes—and then I discovered that instead of my parents paying something like $800 a semester, I could go to a state college for $48 a semester. And as it turned out, J. Fenton McKenna was a friend of Father Boileau, who was the bishop in the district. He was the person who had started the school that I was attending in Fairbanks. They knew each other, and Father Boileau had sent a letter down introducing me to Mr. McKenna. And the truth is that even at state [San Francisco State] College then there was a quota on black students getting into the school. And most of the black students were either in social welfare or education or psychology. At the time I didn't understand the relevance of all that, because I hadn't really grown up here in the States to know the true condition about how black people really lived. So I was a strange person being in the dance department and being in the painting department. My friend Rosalind [Goddard] whom I met, who is still a good friend now—she's a librarian in Los Angeles. She's a head librarian.

MASON:: In the public library?

JACKSON:: Yes, in the Los Angeles library system. We met in literature class when we were nineteen. And we both just had a good time. We had an instructor—I don't remember his name, but he wore his hair parted in the middle, and he wore polka-dot bow ties. And he was so incredible teaching Madame Bovary and Dostoyevsky and a lot of literature. She and I were probably the only two black students—maybe there were one or two others—and we just loved the discussions, we loved the literature. We became very good friends. But she was strange because she wanted to become a children's librarian, so she was kind of off on her own. And because I was a dancer and studying in the art department—and I was always in rehearsal, and at the time dance was in the P.E. [physical education] department. So if you were a P.E. major, that meant you were a lesbian. Well, I didn't want to be a dance major because I was working with the dance company here. My mother had found Alan Howard, who had been with Les Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. He had just started the Pacific Ballet and the Academy of Ballet in San Francisco. So she thought, "Why don't you go study dance there?" Well, that was a good thing, because incredible technique—and quite often—whenever the Bolshoi [Ballet] or the Kirov Ballet came in town, instead of going over to rehearse at San Francisco Ballet they would come—because they knew Mr. Howard from Ballet Russes, they would come rehearse at Pacific Ballet.

MASON:: Did they give any workshops?

JACKSON:: They would have master classes. So those of us who were students, professional students, would actually get to take some of the master classes with the Kirov. Even just to sit in on a class was a privilege. So if you got to take a class, actually that was really just to die for at the time. And then at that time I also worked with Kelly Marie Berry and Bill Couser. And at the time that I was at San Francisco State, Nonsitsi Cayou—who at that time was Dolores Kurtin—she started Wajumbe Dance Company. She has Wajumbe now, and she has Wajumbe [Cultural Institution] as an organization. She had an incredible dance company, an incredible company of male dancers. She at that time was studying modern. There was no official jazz dance then. Then she eventually wrote a book on modern jazz coming from the perspective of where it truly comes from, which is from black movement in the United States. Nobody had ever really written a book about that at the time. But she was at the dance department at San Francisco State then.

MASON:: I guess [Katherine] Dunham technique is just—

JACKSON:: Well, a lot of us whenever you study a work with black dancers, most black dancers would study Dunham technique or Afro-Cuban, Afro-Caribbean. And for me, because I was so much a ballet dancer, it's like that movement—although because I danced all the time—and at San Francisco State I had the fortunate thing happen where I was taking classes at Pacific Ballet, and some of the people I also worked with at school at San Francisco State: Mel Wong, Betsy Ericson, who is now a choreographer with Oakland Ballet—Mel has his own company. Ron Guidi is the director of Oakland Ballet. All of us were sort of—Mel and Betsy were actually in school at San Francisco State. And we studied there with Mr. and Mrs. Joukowsky, Anatole Joukowsky, who was a Slavic man who actually taught character ballet and ballet from another point of view, which was more ethnic dance but really sort of Slavic or Caucasian—you know, European dance. And then—oh, God, what is his name? He was with Anna Halprin and Company. He was a tall, thin man who taught movement from an interior point of view—I think we spent three weeks just lying on the floor—and from a Martha Graham point of view. A man named Rod Strong, who also choreographed West Side Story, which we were in, was the closest to getting to black dance or jazz. He taught jazz dance. And also Ron Poindexter taught it. There were all white people teaching jazz. And I think Nonsitsi had a real fight just to get some recognition. Bernice Peterson was the modern dance teacher there. She I think supported Nonsitsi a lot into getting black dance into—it was just foreign. There were just certain things that were totally foreign at the time that we all started college at San Francisco State. Willie [L.] Brown [Jr.] was one of the first people I remember in the Free Speech Movement. And now I realize Ron Dellums's wife Roscoe [Hicks Dellums] was a student there. She was one of the people who had sort of nominated me and Rosalind to be in the princess court for the Kappas [Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity], which was totally alien to—neither of us pledged to the sororities. It just wasn't the thing we wanted to do. That's why they thought we were really bizarre. But some of the guys and some of the women who did get to know us realized we weren't so freaky and weird. So they asked us to participate in the princess court, and we did that. In a sense it was like a coming-out ball. The guys all wore black tuxedos, and we had our white gowns. It was almost like the LINKS cotillion or something. But it was really fun, and we did it. So that was kind of a nice memory. It was like a recognition from those people. And a few years ago, in 1986, when I had an exhibit at the Black Like Me Gallery, Ted Freeman was one of the people who showed up, which was really nice. He works here in the Bay Area in a lot of, I think, civic areas. He was a football player at that time. So to me that was an honor that somebody from school who was just a normal person who wouldn't normally—you know, who was a very cordial person and not afraid of what I was as an artist then also came back years later. And as a matter of recognition I went to a class reunion, or the yearly reunion they had one year here, and I felt just as separate and alone at that reunion in the mid-eighties as I did when I was on campus. Because everybody seemed to be into their own whatever it is that black people can get into, kind of a materialistic and middle-class kind of lifestyle that has only to do with those things and cars and houses that you earn, as opposed to what it is that you are about inside.

MASON:: Did that bother you back then in college, feeling—?

JACKSON:: Well, I was so busy being a dancer I didn't care. I think the thing that sort of got to me was that just because you were a dancer and the dance department was in the P. E. department that people called you a lesbian. And without even knowing you. I mean, you were really weird. And why would any black person with any common sense want to become a painter, sculptor, or a dancer? Because you don't make any money doing those things. Or the people are all really weird, really odd. Since then I have met a number of other people who were odd, [laughs] who were either musicians or writers or in other areas. We sort of bumped into each other. They all felt kind of alone and alienated as well. But it was a big campus in a sense, and the thing at the time was that it was a transient campus. It probably still is. And the average age, from what I understand, from when I started college was thirty-three. And I was sixteen, seventeen. And really the most black people I had seen was in San Francisco. Of course, when I went to Los Angeles to work in the post office, that was the most black people I had ever seen in one place at a time. But it was just a different lifestyle. I mean, I basically grew up in the woods. I think that my growing up was probably not too much different from people in the South. When I finally got to go to the South, I had more in common with people in the South who actually grew up in rural areas and lived basically as a result of an interaction with nature.

MASON:: Yeah, and walked down those lonely country roads.

JACKSON:: Yeah, and no electricity and no streetlights and no fast cars and all that kind of thing. I was dying to get out to San Francisco, because I wanted to know about beatniks. I wanted to get to North Beach and—

MASON:: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

JACKSON:: Yeah, that was what I wanted, to get out to where there was poetry. Because at sixteen the realization that came to me especially—and [when] my father gave me the paints—was jazz. I went out, and it was actually at a pharmacy that had a rack—they used to have these wrought iron racks in the middle of the floor, and they had all these albums on them, records. So the very first album that I ever bought was Duke Ellington at Newport. And I just recently heard that music. Somebody was talking about it. I guess it was a Newport [jazz] festival they were having, and they were going over some of the early concerts that were held in like 1952, and I realized that was the album that I had bought and that music. That was when I also discovered Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.

MASON:: What was it about the music that attracted you?

JACKSON:: I just thought it was incredible music. And it was music that was poetry. It was music like nature to me. It was music that seemed to fit with my desire to become a painter. Because at twelve I decided that I was going to become a painter, a ballet dancer, and a fashion model. Those were all three things that I was going to become. But I knew I had to paint. And that's when I really sort of—at fifteen, sixteen, I very seriously knew I was going to paint. I set up a corner in our dining room. I don't think I had an easel, just a canvas against the wall, and I started to paint. And the painting that I sent back to Carnegie was actually of a Nigerian woman. I have no idea how or where, it may have been from a photograph. It was a women in a crowd. And I entered that in—they would have a county fair in the summertime, and they had a lot of professional artists entered in the exhibition at the fair. And I didn't know that you didn't if you were just a new painter, an amateur painter, that you didn't enter your painting with professional painters. I just took my painting to the fair. I don't know why or how, but I just did. And I won first place.

MASON:: Wow.

JACKSON:: And then the first nude that I painted—I didn't know the body, I didn't know the figure at all. I was trying to paint myself in parts. And in those days you didn't look at your body, right? So my first nude was really this lumpy, strange-looking—the color—I was having a hard time trying to get the skin color right. I mixed the paints, because I was just teaching myself how to use oil paints and how to mix them up. And I think I may have gone to that same pharmacy where I bought the record album, and they had how-to-paint books, those things from back in the 1940s and fifties. That told you how to prime the canvas with yellow ochre and how to go from light to dark or from dark to light. And that was just how I started painting.

MASON:: So the paintings that you saw in person, were they mostly the ones at the fairs? Or were there museums?

JACKSON:: Well, there were paintings at my school. In Fairbanks—actually, in Alaska there are more artists for the population than there are anywhere else in the world. There's only about 250,000 people.

MASON:: Is there more than like New Orleans?

JACKSON:: The ratio, the proportion, for example, because I think at that time there were no more than 250,000 people in Alaska, the whole state—now there may be either 275,000 or 300,000 people. I don't think it has gone up very much. So the proportion is really high as far as artists, musicians, writers. Everybody paints and writes. And you play a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble in the wintertime. Families do things together. Because it's cold; you can't go outside. And the landscape is the most incredible landscape. When I went to the Grand Canyon it was beautiful, but Alaska is more beautiful. I mean, the air is the most incredible air. I can still smell the air sometimes. And because it's such a large state, there are places that no human being has ever been in that state, or if they've been there they don't come out.

MASON:: Well, I guess we can talk more about this later, but in your work—and a lot of people point this out—you use a lot of white and a lot of space. So I guess—

JACKSON:: Well, you know what's very interesting—it's like the works I'm starting now, they're coming from dark to light. And I don't know whether that's maturity or what it is. The last exhibition that I had, I was not using a lot of white; I was using more color on the total canvas. I was going back to the way I started painting in a sense, one of the ways I started painting with oil paint. And people were having difficulty with that, which is too bad. Because people want you to do the same thing that you've been doing over and over and over again. But you have to grow. And the interesting thing for me now is that I realize that—well, I started a series of work from black out in the mid-eighties, and I seemed to be doing the same thing with some of the new pieces, or going to gray. Actually, I don't have any canvas. I don't have any paint now, so I'm having to use what I've got. And heavy paper. I'm just drawing. I've got some canvas but I don't have stretcher bars. It's just impossible to be able to buy anything right now. But I think that it's a level of maturity as well. And I think people misunderstood what the white was about. It's not about Alaska and ice or snow or any of that kind of stuff. It's just like now I just designed the clothes for Macbeth. And one of the things that I mentioned early on to the director was that the typical thing for the witches in Macbeth is that everyone makes them black, and that becomes a symbol of evil. Well, in cultures other than European cultures, and even in some European cultures, white was a sign of death and evil or "the other," the spiritual other. And then there was a photograph in Newsweek of these women in Colombia who were in mourning. Their faces were painted white, they were wearing white, because their husbands had been killed in this drug thing that happened. So from that—the director hadn't even—you know, it was something that hadn't even occurred to him that this could be a possibility. Well, we made the witches white. And it's really disturbing. A lot of white people especially—and when we did a symposium they said, "Well, why white witches?"

MASON:: Reverse racism. [laughs]

JACKSON:: And one woman even said, "Why not brown witches?" And I said because the murderers were brown, you know, in brown tones, that's why. So it really bothered a lot of people. And in African art, in some areas of Africa, that thing, that white that's over the mask, is like a protection. Or it's that thing that shuns evil, the wickedness. And I think that probably the thing that I really want to keep on track throughout this whole thing is how I think my work has been misinterpreted. And Samella Lewis at one point, when she asked me to come down and give a talk at the Claremont Colleges and I started talking about my work, was surprised to find out what was really in my work and what the work was about. So it made her have a whole different idea of what it was. I think a lot of people just thought my painting was this cute stuff that was just coming out of this little naive girl who happened on the scene in L.A., and I don't think a lot of people took me very seriously as a painter in the beginning. I'm not sure—and this now, in my maturity as a woman, realizing how even this last exhibition that was in Los Angeles—Betye Saar and I both were in the exhibition.

MASON:: This was in the 1960s.

JACKSON:: Yeah. I just really felt that neither one of us were really taken seriously for what we did. I didn't get to talk to Betye about it, but from the look on her face—you know, there were a number of us who were really unhappy about that, just being misrepresented completely about what our work was. It was just very disturbing that people, black people especially, think that I'm coming from a European point of view because it's on canvas as opposed to being sculpture or assemblage. You look at those women out there, they paint on their walls, on their houses.

MASON:: Are you speaking of South African women?

JACKSON:: That's the greeting. That's that symbol that represents you and who you are. I remember once being in San Francisco during the early seventies, and this sculptor came from West Africa. He was just railing and ranting about how women shouldn't be painters and women couldn't be sculptors and women couldn't be this and they couldn't do that. And I think I opened my big mouth. Because I used to do that a lot, just open my big mouth to people, and say, "I don't see why not. I am, and I do." You know, "Was I a man in another life? Is that what you're trying to tell me? I have no right to do this thing?" I just think from a point of view because what I'm doing was not—when we talked about the [Black] Panthers in the Emory Douglas show, the challenge there was that I was told, "Why don't you give over this gallery to us? We'll really do something with it." And I said, "I can't do that, because as it is, the gallery [Gallery 32] gets to a lot of people who would not normally come to see this work. This Panther show is seen by a lot of working-class, middle-class, you know, all levels of people, white, black, green, purple, because they don't feel afraid to come into this space. They feel the space is theirs to come into. But if it was owned by the Panthers or taken over by the Panthers, then the connotation—they would not have this freedom to come and look at Emory's work." His work was beautiful work.

MASON:: I see. The Panthers wanted—

JACKSON:: The Panthers wanted me to just give them the gallery. And they also challenged my work. They said, "Well, why don't you have guns in your work?" But it's as if someone like Romare Bearden or Jacob Lawrence or Varnette Honeywood—when she does her work it is coming from her personal experience. My personal experience was where I grew up. I could have grown up in Mississippi or Alaska. My personal relationship to nature, which I think black people are really about—just recently I was reading an article about the farmers in Africa. The farmers in Africa are women. And there is an integral relationship with nature and the land and having to grow the food and having to take care of your family. You have to know the movement of the moon, the sun, the stars, birds, animals, what happens when you put a seed into the ground and you make it grow. That's really what we are about. Well, we are so much into survival and struggle, having to survive in this mess of a country, that we lose love for each other, and we're constantly angry. And we're going to be anyway. It's not possible not to be angry living in this kind of situation that we're living in. You know, we're still in slavery. And it's just getting older that you really sort of change what you think and how you think and what you've done in the past. I was crazy, I guess. I was really a very bizarre person when I came into Los Angeles. I had lived here in the Bay Area. And even in Alaska—I came out here admiring beat poets. People like Ted Joans, he was a black beat poet. I knew about writings from the East Coast, things I'd find in the libraries. My first exposure to black artists was a little book that I'd found in French that included Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Barbara Chase-Riboud—

MASON:: When was it written?

JACKSON:: This was written in the fifties. It was written in French. It was a French book. It's a little narrow book called, in French, Ten Negro Artists from the United States.

MASON:: Oh, I'm not familiar with it.

JACKSON:: It's a little cheap book kind of thing. I don't remember where I found it. I may have found it in a bookstore that was just a thing that somebody threw away. It was cheap. I got it for fifty cents probably. But that was my first recognition or knowledge of any black artists. But even looking at that book, I didn't think of them as black artists; I just thought of them as artists. Or as "Negro" artists as it was called. When I got to Los Angeles I was living in Echo Park with some friends. I'd actually auditioned—I'd graduated from college. My last year of college I was teaching art to make extra money at St. Stephen's School. I taught all the grades, first through eighth grade. Then I got a job working at the post office. And a director I had worked for, Steve Jones, had worked with Nonsitsi. We did Fly Blackbird, the musical, here in San Francisco. He knew I was working at the post office, and he knew that the Sacramento [and Fresno Civic Light Operas] Music Circus was looking for a black ballet dancer. It was the days—and they still do this—where they look all over the country, they say, and they can't find ten black actors to do something. So they auditioned a women named Princessa [Lowla], who was an Afro-Cuban dancer, and I don't know who else they auditioned, and then they auditioned me. And of course, I was totally a ballet dancer, so I got the role. I went up to Sacramento to dance with the Music Circus and then to Fresno. And then later that year we went to Mexico and South America, eleven countries altogether—Mexico, Central and South America—to perform as a State Department tour [Music Theatre USA]. And they tried to propagandize us and tell us what to say, because it was the beginning of [the] Vietnam [War] and all of that. And [Lyndon B.] Johnson had just become president. Anyway, that was kind of an eye-opener and an enlightenment, because it was my exposure out of the country to see how other people lived, and also making some value judgments about how we lived here.

MASON:: What was most striking about—? You say you went to Mexico first.

JACKSON:: Well we went to Mexico and we rehearsed there. Then we went to Venezuela, to Caracas. And in Caracas there were ten of us in a company of fifty-seven people, ten black people. When we got to Caracas we were on a television program. When we got to the television station, the cameramen, the producers, the host, were all black people. This was in 1966. And this didn't happen here. I don't think there was anybody. There was a black journalist, maybe. No, that wasn't until the seventies. I mean, there were some black people, but if they were there you didn't know. You just didn't see it. You didn't see black faces on television, except for Amos and Andy and Flip Wilson, maybe.

MASON:: When Americans go abroad, one of the first things they learn is the world isn't black and white. People don't necessary think of themselves in those terms. For example, when you go to Africa, you might be black, but you might be a Muslim, so you're another class.

JACKSON:: Yeah, exactly.

MASON:: So I don't know what the hierarchy was like in Venezuela.

JACKSON:: Also, the other thing was when we got to South America we also realized that as "artists," in quotes, we were given recognition at the embassy parties. Well, after we left Mexico, at the embassy parties, instead of meeting all these government officials and bureaucrats, we were introduced to other artists who were the leading artists in the country. And I was so young and I didn't know at the time—when we got to Santiago, to Chile, Pablo Neruda was there. He became one of my favorite poets. The leading dancers in the countries. They took us to Teatro Colon and gave us tours through. We were exposed to some of the most incredible artists in the world in South America. Those people were considered the intellectual and aesthetic elite, and they were the privileged people as far as being those people that we were introduced to as opposed to meeting somebody like George [H.W.] Bush or Dan [J. Danforth] Quayle. [laughs] And to have your picture taken shaking hands with someone—I mean, to meet Pablo Neruda, who was really a true statesman, who was a real poet, who was just an incredible man. I wish that I had known more, that I had been more sophisticated at the time. We went into places we weren't supposed to go. They tried to tell us what to say. Nobody wanted to be told what to say or how to answer questions. We ended up in some red light districts. We ended up in discussions we weren't supposed to get into, political discussions and things like that. In Argentina, especially, we arrived just as there were a couple of uprisings. They'd just shot up Buenos Aires. And when we got to Cordova, students had died the day before, some of the students that we were going to be dealing with. And our interpreter, a guy name Dennis Baldwin, whose family lived in Novato [California]—I haven't talked to Dennis since, but I think his brother was one of those people who was missing in Africa. They never found him. Later, I think during the seventies, there was a Baldwin who was missing, and my mother thought she recognized his family. But he was our interpreter in Cordova, got us out of a lot of scrapes. Because we were always getting into these mix-ups with people thinking that they were going to kidnap us and take us off and have little trysts and things. But I wish that I had been more sophisticated and knowledgeable then. I was considered sophisticated at the time. But my personal feeling was that I would not join the Peace Corps, because the Peace Corps seemed very right-wing. Now there are people who say to me—you know Arthur [Monroe] would say to me, "Well, you worked on a State Department tour, and that's so right-wing." But at that time it was not. And it was the only opportunity for a young black person to go to another country. I wanted to go on a museum tour when I was in college, but I couldn't save $1,000, and I didn't want to ask my parents.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1992

MASON:: So you were talking about having political discussions. So was the State Department basically trying to tell you guys [Music Theatre USA]—?

JACKSON:: Well, before we left Sacramento they got us all together and gave us a list of questions and a list of answers. And immediately, we all being young, especially, said, "Are you serious? You're going to tell us how to answer questions?" And they told us what places not to go. You know, "Don't go in certain places, and don't get into—." And then in each city we would arrive, we would be on the bus from the airport, and we'd get our mail. And my parents became very upset with me—my mother [Ann-Marie Butler Jackson], especially, my father [Roy Dedrick Jackson] not so much—because she thought I wasn't answering her. Our mail would be backed up three weeks. So if a letter was sent one week, we wouldn't get it until three weeks later. If it was sent when we were in Mexico, we didn't get it till maybe we were in Buenos Aires. And they were opening our mail. And I had one friend [John Lazar] who I guess was really dumb. They used to have incense in little squares, little cakes. They probably still do. He sent me some incense in a letter. And by the time I got the letter, they handed it to me on the bus and said, "Here is your letter with some kind of black stuff seeping out of it." So I don't know if they thought it was opium or what it was or some kind of strange drug or whatever, but they checked it out. But they would open our letters and read the mail. And there were a couple of people who got letters, and they had things crossed out in the letters with black. You know how you see the memos on television, and they black out what they don't want to be read.

MASON:: Yeah, like in the Soviet Union at the time, for example.

JACKSON:: Yeah. Well, it happens right here in this country. So we wouldn't go for that. We were a problem group all the way around. I sort of kept a journal on all the little trysts and affairs and things and people who got sent home and all of that.

MASON:: Was that the punishment for saying the wrong thing?

JACKSON:: No. Basically, there were people who just—there were mates, a couple of mates along, who just caused problems, so they went home. Or people who couldn't stand the tour. It was basically that kind of thing. They booked us incorrectly. We all arrived in South America with summer clothes. And the woman from the State Department, she had booked us three weeks still into the winter season. We all almost caught pneumonia. We were all really sick in a lot of it. So it was an interesting tour. Also to say, there were a couple of people who had mononucleosis and they wouldn't tell. Or they had measles and they wouldn't tell that they had it so that the tour could go on. Because they wouldn't have let us out of a country. There were a lot of interesting political things. At one point when we were in Quito, they turned off our electricity, and there were tanks going around the tents. They didn't want us there because we represented the United States, and they felt that any symbol of us being from the United States meant that we were going to try to force Vietnam, the same kind of situation, on their countries.

MASON:: Did they make any distinctions, though, between blacks and whites?

JACKSON:: Only on the social level. For example, when we got to get out to know people—basically, first of all, while I was there—in high school we automatically studied like four languages. You studied English, Latin, French, German, or Greek. I didn't study Spanish, so it was an irony to have to go to a South American country. So I had to teach myself Spanish really fast. Well, most people thought—and ray hair was really long because I had been a dancer, so they thought that I was from Brazil. And I didn't speak Spanish well, so they thought I spoke Portuguese. But I had a good accent. So many places that I went, if we went out alone, they didn't want to believe that we were from the United States. They said, "Oh, no black person could afford to come from the United States to be here," that all people of color are poor people. So they just took us in pretty much. So we just had a number of advantages of being able to be taken around and really sort of taken into families with people.

MASON:: So in the political discussions did they see you as disenfranchised and not really a part of—?

JACKSON:: Exactly. And the two shows that we took to South America were Carousel and Showboat. And all of us here are saying, "Oh, God, Showboat. 'Tote dat barge.'" My best friend [Wilma Alexander], who was trying to introduce me to this guy, said, "You mean you're going to go to South America and 'tote dat barge' instead of staying here with this wonderful man?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm going to South America, because I can always come back and this man will be here, but this may be my only opportunity to go to another country. And then to get paid for it on top of it all." Well, as it turned out, when we got to South America, people identified more with what they saw as the political truth in Showboat. Because here you have these slaves, you have a social condition. And Carousel was just a big piece of fluff, which it is anyway. It's a big piece of fluff. And it was not relevant to their lives, they thought. And they were saying, "Well, why didn't you bring West Side Story? West Side Story is exciting. It's about a conflict that has to do with two different kinds of people. And it's just a better work anyway." I would have loved to do West Side Story. So as it turned out, these people who were the producers were really shocked to find out the only reason they took Showboat was because they had to integrate the company in order to go on a State Department tour. They had to have Asian people, black people, Hispanic people. So they had like one Hispanic, one woman who was Portuguese. They had an Irish musician in the orchestra. There were ten of us who were black. So that was to fulfill that. It wasn't necessarily because they were so much in love with doing this show; it was just in order to get on the tour. And then they were surprised to find out that the people in South America had a different kind of political consciousness which we don't have here. We still don't have it, because we don't struggle enough. And we're struggling now. I'm seeing the struggle and the kinds of things that I saw in South America: one woman sitting with a little iron pot and the same banana that she was cooking and trying to sell every day for three days with her baby there on the street. Now I've seen these same kind of things here in the United States, traveling around. Going through New York, you step over people. Even in New Haven [Connecticut], you get to know the people who live on the street and who sleep in the snow, and who sleep in urine and who—this has been the existence in other countries for years, and now the United States—we're not very old. We're only three hundred years old, and we're already a mess.

MASON:: Well, [Ronald W.] Reagan [and] [George H.W.] Bush helped out a lot.

JACKSON:: Well, we started on the wrong foot. When people come and say that they've conquered millions of people, the irony! Millions of people lived here, and somebody comes and says they've discovered a place where millions of people live?

MASON:: But, you know, the Indians weren't "people" so—

JACKSON:: Yeah, that's like we were "savages" also. I mean, it was better to enslave us also than even—because we had no souls according to the Catholic Church, to the papacy. And for me it's kind of incredible, having been educated by Jesuits. I think that if I had grown up here in the United States proper the education would have been different. I think because we were so far away, those teachers took a lot of risks. We would have debates one week about pro-God and the next week anti-God. So we would debate in favor of atheism and then the next week against it. We switched teams. So there was always this—their feeling was if you really believe in something you've got to be able to argue well the other way for it. The interesting thing was when I was working with [Edmund G.] "Jerry" Brown [Jr.] in the [California] Arts Council, at first I thought he was a real jerk. And then I realized that because of his actually having grown up in a Jesuit seminary and then his Buddhist training that quite often he would throw out an opposite or a kind of startling idea and get a reaction and cause a discussion to grow.

MASON:: Oh, is that what he's about? [laughs]

JACKSON:: That's really what he's about. He wasn't interested in becoming president this time. He was interested in getting people to think about what your real situation is here. One of the complaints that I heard from the Indian community was that he didn't really have any people of color following him. And in a sense you have this privileged elite—I mean what I see here in the Bay Area—and that is part of the reason for years I sort of fought being in the Bay Area. Other than the fact that this was my parents'—this was their ground and their territory. And now, since my parents aren't here, I can establish my own self being here in the area. And I prefer it, because there is a great deal of intellectual and political thought. But my feeling was that there was so much rhetoric here and people who talked as opposed to actually doing and acting. This is a very privileged area, as far as I'm concerned. Because people here can expound and can be politically risky. What I'm finding out living here now is that people on the city council are socialists and communists. In Berkeley. Only in Berkeley. Having lived on the East Coast, where everybody is still into a Yankee mentality and very racist—I mean, just the presence of a black person, they'll switch and walk to the other side of the street.

MASON:: That's happened to you?

JACKSON:: Oh, yes. And it happens a lot. For example, in New Haven, where you've got that Yale [University] community, and people are living in fear of the community around them, and then when you get off that campus and live in the community, you discover it's a really wonderful community. It's a beautiful little town with all these old buildings, that there is a life outside of that entity that is very conservative. Within that entity there are also some kinds of wild things. Like the drama department that I was in has totally existed within itself. Everybody there is poor, because everybody had to work. Everybody is on fellowship. People are there because of talent and not privilege. It is a privilege to be there, because you've been hand picked and chosen out of a lot of people. But it is about talent as opposed to having an in. People are shocked when they are finally accepted in the department. And then you have to work. You work your butt off for three years. And I don't know about in other departments, but that—there are some people I know who were there because they wanted to get out and make money. But for the black students and Asian and the few Chicano, Latin, students who were there, the realization is who you are. Because you're confronted with some intense racism every day. And if a person so chooses to go the other route and become very conservative like Clarence Thomas, for whom it is well known there that he did hang out at the porno flicks over on George Street—

MASON:: Oh, did he?

JACKSON:: Yes. You know, it's like you make a choice. And you make a choice about what you're going to do when you get out. The last word for me was Yale. For years it represented people like George Bush. It still does. But I think that if you have a certain type of life experience and maturity, then you must take what you get and then use it. Angela [Y.] Davis has done that. I was thinking about people whom I really admire a great deal, and I was kind of waiting for something to happen. What's going to happen next? I mean, Angela was there when that Emory Douglas exhibition happened. Angela was going to jail early on in that whole situation that went on there, where people were being arrested for parking tickets, including me. Which seems so stupid when you consider somebody like Angela Davis and the [Alprentice] "Bunchy" Carter situation and all those things that were going on with people who were really doing something. It was really relevant. But those of us who were doing other things—David Hammons, every time he went out on the street they were stopping him and picking him up and putting him in jail. So as artists we were threatening. And what was threatening about us? The images that David was making were threatening. My imagery, as people took it for, who would it threaten? But it was the fact that there was a place where people could come to and talk. And there were not set exhibitions. You never knew what was going to happen at Gallery 32. It was according to the ideas that came out of a lot of the discussions, that is, trying to decide, "Who is it? What are we? And what is our relevance to the community being black artists?" After going to South America and coming back to Los Angeles, I lived in Echo Park, and that was kind of a Bohemian, mixed-culture neighborhood. Very similar to probably a Northern California lifestyle. Really more Bohemian, and a lot of old "beats."

MASON:: Weren't there a lot of women who were at the Woman's Building who lived down in Echo Park?

JACKSON:: Later, probably later. I mean, this was really early. This was before the Black Arts Council started. I remember a photographer, Malcolm Lubliner, coming up and saying, "I was just at the museum, the L.A. [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art]." And he said, "Wow, there was the hippest jazz concert down in the basement. And there was this art exhibit. And there was food, and there was all this stuff. Oh, it was just incredible." And we were saying, "Well, how did you find out about this?" And he said, "I just happened to go by there, and it just happened. And the security guards are the ones who put on this thing." And that was the first that I sort of heard about the Black Arts Council. But I didn't know it was the Black Arts Council.

MASON:: Well, I should stop, because we are kind of getting ahead.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1992

JACKSON:: When I was at San Francisco State [College] in the art department, basically those were my first real art classes, although they were not really like classes. They were more studio sessions. We had life drawing. Every year that we were there we had at least one or two life drawing classes, painting classes. And they lasted several hours. For example, I think one painting class met in the morning, and then it met in the afternoon, so it would be a whole day of painting as opposed to just a couple of hours. And I had sculpture class. I think my first sculpture class was with John Moyer. At the time I was seventeen; it was my first year. I remember him being my adviser. And the first thing he said to me was, "Don't worry if you flunk out, because I went into a mental institution after my first year in art school." And I didn't quite understand what that meant until later. I realized that, I guess, because I was a woman and because I was black I wasn't supposed to pass the art classes or I wasn't supposed to do anything. I don't know what it meant.

MASON:: Was he black?

JACKSON:: No, of course not. There weren't any black instructors then.

MASON:: No? Well, how did he end up in a mental institution? Was he identifying with you?

JACKSON:: I don't know what he was. But that was his advice to me. As my adviser, that's what he said to me. And then it turned out that he was my sculpture instructor the first year. It was kind of a basic sculpture class—learning how to use armature, carving wood and clay, and all that. He was known for being a sculptor who hammered a lot of nails into his work. Then I studied sculpture with Mel Henderson, and that was kind of fun—a more free kind of class in the sense that we actually developed our own work more. That was where I really began to work in assembling found pieces. We'd take a lot of trips to the dump. At that time you could go to the dump. I understand now it's not as easy to get into dumps as it was then. We'd just collect a bunch of stuff, anything from metal to wood to old tires to anything we found that was kind of a nice shape and texture.

MASON:: Were you attracted to any particular materials? I think the other day you mentioned wood, you liked to paint over it.

JACKSON:: Yeah, I think I used a lot of wood. I was experimenting with found wood pieces and including plaster and metal pieces and then sort of washing over the wood in colors, so that the color would be just like—there would just be an essence of the color, but the texture of the natural wood would show through. And I did a number of plaster sculptures, which were not like what you think of as really traditional and classical sculpture. They were more using the roughness of the plaster, and kind of taking away as opposed to leaving everything there. It's like maybe the basic shape might be there but leaving out elements. For example, even using the figure, just taking elements of the figure away and leaving kind of rough surfaces, adding into the plaster and using the plaster in its natural color and form as opposed to trying to add anything to it. But basically the sculpture I was doing began to get bigger and bigger and bigger,

MASON:: Why is that?

JACKSON:: Just the way I tend to work. I tend to work really large. In the same way that I was working large in my painting—at that time I wasn't working as large. The rule then in art school was that if you made it, then you had to move it. So it didn't matter whether you were male or female, then, you moved it. Perhaps if you had friends they would help you move whatever you did if you worked on a really large painting. But it was equal; everybody had to move their own stuff. So when you start getting things that are so big and heavy and you can't move them and you don't have any place to store them—my parents [Roy Dedrick Jackson and Ann-Marie Butler Jackson] were living in a flat sort of walking distance from the school, but it was not exactly the kind of place you'd store art pieces. I remember when they asked me what I wanted for my birthday I said that I wanted an easel. I wanted one of those great big, heavy oak kinds of easels—you know, that was six or seven feet tall. And then, when my birthday came, they had given me this little metal—it's like a little watercolor easel that folds up and puts away. You know, their comment was, "We don't want that big old ugly thing in our house."

MASON:: So they were supportive only up to a point, [laughs]

JACKSON:: Yeah. It was a very chic apartment, I guess. It was a very nice apartment, and I had my own room. But at that point I was still living with my family. I hadn't really gotten my own space yet to—and I hadn't even thought about it. Because I was just going to school and I was dancing. I wasn't at home most of the time. I was always in rehearsal, always in the studio at school.

MASON:: Do you feel like you were working with a particular theme? Or were you just kind of exploring shapes and colors mostly?

JACKSON:: Well, I think as a student that is all you can do is explore shapes, because you're really trying to find whoever it is you are. I think the advantage I had at that time was that, taking art classes, the classes were still very small. They were still one to one with the instructors. We also were there because we really were all interested in art. We had discussions about art and about art history. We had one-unit projects, and you either worked in the gallery installing exhibitions there on campus or you worked for a whole year just pulling slides for lectures. That was incredible for me, because that was the first time I'd seen works by some artists with black images in them. It still didn't occur to me that specifically these people were black, but it was just that there were some other kinds of art. There were African art images that I got to see, because I was pulling all these lectures for Western Art History class and for the different instructors' classes. So that was really great to be able to go through that slide file every day, which was an incredible slide file, at San Francisco State. That was a one-unit class. Those two one-unit classes, probably I learned more just by the exposure in those classes—the exhibitions at that time at San Francisco State might be prints or drawings by Renaissance artists. I mean, they were the real thing. So here you've got your hands on these real pieces of work from history.

MASON:: So they were mostly historical? Or did they do contemporary?

JACKSON:: Some were historical, and there may have been some contemporary. Sometimes there were works of—an exhibition of Kenneth Patchen, who is a poet and a contemporary artist. So there were different kinds of exhibitions. It was a matter of learning how to take them out of the crates, putting up the exhibition panels. And more than likely that was the first experience, without even realizing it, that, when I did open Gallery 32—I wasn't really opening a gallery, but I hadn't thought about the fact that I actually had had experience, that kind of experience, which made it possible for me to do what I did. I really didn't even think of it as gallery experience. It was simply that we enjoyed doing this for a production unit. I don't know, maybe there was a naivete with some of us where we didn't even think of what we did as work or earning points. And we never thought that we were going to go out and make money with art; it was a matter of loving what we did. The last thing we expected was that we were going to make any money. They had some education classes, but they were usually for people who were going to become teachers. So there were a lot of women who were getting their credential credit by taking an art class. I think that class and probably the introduction] to art were the most general classes at that time in the art department. All the rest were really for people who were seriously interested in becoming painters or printmakers or photographers. And as it was structured, for example, I never was able to take a printmaking class. Because there were only four to six people in that class every semester, so it was almost impossible to get in if you weren't a printmaking major. Photography was required, and that was very frustrating, because the amount of money I was putting into supplies for photography—because a lot of paper went into the garbage can. I mean, there were a lot of prints that just didn't work. I mean, you mess up when you're trying to do the chemicals. Ceramics was frustrating, because if you didn't mix up the right chemical combinations for the glazes you could destroy a pot in the kiln and destroy everybody else's pots too in the process.

MASON:: Oh, so you did everything.

JACKSON:: Yeah, we did everything. The glazes had to be done. You had to do all the chemical weights and weighing with grams. You were literally doing chemistry. So for me all these other things got to a point were they were really frustrating, because I really wanted to paint and make sculpture. And then you knew you were going to get a studio eventually, and if you didn't have one then—I mean, living with the family, it was sort of embarrassing to have to work on the kitchen table. I remember one guy coming by—because I think some people did take me seriously then as an artist after they realized that I wasn't going to just be there for one year, and then out and off into some other major. He came by to see what work I was doing, and I was sort of showing him on my kitchen table. And that's when I realized that it really wasn't going to work for me to live at my parents' house for very much longer if I was going to become a serious painter or sculptor. But then I had no financial means, really, because I was working as a ballet dancer. And most of the money that I had or that my father would put up was going to pay for dance classes. Even though I was on scholarship, I still took so many classes that it was over and above my scholarship that I had. Literally, all I did was dance and paint and work as a sculptor when I was in college. My education in Alaska was so thorough that when I got to college I was over-prepared for college. We were prepared to do a terra paper, and you typed the whole thing, and you made no mistakes. You did the bibliography and footnotes and all of that, which was still expected at that time in college. But there were times you could hand write a paper and turn it in. I didn't even study that hard in some of the general education classes. And then I learned how to spread them out so I'd take more art classes and take fewer general education.

MASON:: Yeah, let's see. There are two things that I wanted to ask you. I'll just ask them both before I forget.

JACKSON:: Okay. [laughs]

MASON:: You were saying that the art department was kind of new, so I was wondering if there was kind of a dominant aesthetic, a particular approach that you felt the faculty had toward art. Were they more interested in figures or abstractions or anything like that? And the other question which is kind of connected, I guess, is—you were talking about how you felt that the students were going there because they loved art, and they didn't believe that they might make money off of art. I was just wondering if that was partly because the students felt, or maybe you felt, that a lot of the institutions in San Francisco—the galleries and the museums and stuff—just weren't open to the kind of art that you all were interested in or—

JACKSON:: No. Well, for the first question, basically—and I'm not sure how old the department was when I started there in '61. All the instructors were working artists. And at that time—it's like this whole business of selling art is new now. The eighties was all about that. The tradition in the arts—it's like usually you found some hole or someplace that you could paint that was cheap because you had no money. The ridiculous thing now is that all the rents are so outrageous that I can't even buy supplies. Or most of the people who can afford studios have parents who pay for them, and they just do it as a whim while they're in school. It's a cheap way to have a fun place to live while they're in school. At that time, when I entered San Francisco State, there was kind of a transition happening. We were still in the period of abstract expressionism, as those artists were very strong. And I guess toward the end of my being in school the pop art movement—Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, all those people—was sort of becoming popular. And we saw it as advertising art in a way, becoming this popular art form. So I was sort of squished between the abstract expressionists and that new kind of art. Although while we were there we were sort of making some new forms of our own. For example, what happened was that acrylic paints had just been invented. I remember a man coming around with a briefcase about the size of yours with some samples. They told us to bring some baby food jars, and we each got some. I think for about twenty-five cents each we got samples of different acrylic paints in these baby food jars. We tried those paints. They were really flat. They were really ugly by comparison to the life that you have with oil paint, so we didn't like them that much. Another thing that was being experimented with was using the catalyst—wait, a catalyst is a reactor. There are two things you put together, two chemicals you put together, and you can't have one without the other. One is the catalyst, and the other I forget the name of it. You put these two things together and this sort of foam form would happen. And there was one women who was actually—it could have been Lynda Benglis. I still haven't figured this out. I think it might have been her or another woman who would take canvas, and she'd just poke a hole, like a pinhole, in the canvas, and she sort of pushed through this catalyst and the reactor to it, and it would go through and make these forms that would kind of come out on the other side of the canvas. And then she sort of painted those, painted in the canvas around that. So that was like a new sculptural form that was integrated into painting as well. So we were there at a time when a number of new vehicles, form mediums, were being introduced. So we experimented with those things, sort of between the traditional forms and the new forms that we were sort of inventing. At that time, still, it was considered that as an artist you looked into history to see what was done, and we were thorough as far as history: Western art, Asian art, American art history. You had to know those things very well in relationship to your own work and what other people were doing. You had to know what other artists were doing around just because we wanted to keep up. But we were in love with texture. Textures everywhere! It was so exciting just to be able to—I had a couple of friends in art school, and we'd just get excited going out walking in the street and seeing a crack in the—

MASON:: Everybody was wearing all those crazy clothes back then.

JACKSON:: Well, no, that hadn't started yet. That didn't really start until '65 or '66. When I got back from South America, that's when the Haight [Ashbury] thing started. We'd just begun. It had just begun toward the end of my college, around '65, '66, that we started—I remember making a dress out of a sheet and tie-dyeing it with wax. And it smelled like wax. I ironed it, and I dyed my Capezio shoes silver, and I wore my fishnets, and we went off to an art ball, where they had just introduced—oh, we went to the Fillmore Auditorium. My friend Bill [Pickerell] and I went. We were both in art school together. And we went to the Fillmore, and they had psychedelic lights. They weren't called psychedelic yet. So that was toward the end of school. But at the time early on between '61 and—some of us started late. I started a semester late at San Francisco State, so I was there in '62. And the people who became my friends, Dirk Van Gelder and Bill Pickerell, we all started that second semester. And it's just that we were really—it was the art that was important, and also reading poetry and literature. It's like yesterday John Cage died. John Cage was one of those sort of early influences as far as sound and poetry and communication. We read a lot of T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings and anybody we could get our hand on, any writing. And at that time the Kama Sutra was the popular thing to read, you know, very erotic reading. And Henry Miller was being taken to court for Tropic of Capricorn and some of his writing. So there was all of that stuff that was happening. What was it? Peter Voulkos I think was the one who did the Kama Sutra sculpture on top of one of the warehouses. And there was a big controversy about his taking that down, about it being pornographic art on top of this building. This was all happening around this time in the early sixties in art here. There were very few galleries here, so it wasn't about having a gallery or being in a gallery. There was Vorpal [Gallery] downtown, down in a warehouse, and there was a gallery in the basement of a Victorian house maybe up in Pacific Heights or Union Street. You know, there were a few. The Keanes [Walter S. and Margaret Hawkins Keane] had a gallery [Keane Art Galleries] with those ugly children with the big eyes. That was down in North Beach, I think.

MASON:: The Keanes?

JACKSON:: The Keanes yeah. They were artists who painted these children. And I think there might still be a Keane gallery somewhere in downtown San Francisco.

MASON:: Yeah, I remember.

JACKSON:: I think it's only the woman now who's alive, and her things are a little bit more moderate. They actually opened in a small space in North Beach, and you'd walk in, and there'd be these children with these big eyes. They sold a lot of work to tourists, I think. But it wasn't about showing at galleries. Nobody even thought about that. If artists had shows or exhibits it was because of them maybe having an idea about what their art should be. It's very similar to when we were all talking about what was black art in Los Angeles. Cecil [Fergerson] and I were talking about it this morning when he called me on the phone, about the exhibitions not really necessarily being programmed or being about money. It was about ideas and about problems that we were trying to solve, or maybe somebody having a body of work and then wanting to finally put it out there as a critical matter as opposed to just having an exhibit for money. That just was not the idea. Nobody ever expected that you would sell anything. If you did, that was fortunate. But as students that was the last thing on our minds. You didn't think that you would become Picassos or Salvador Dali or anybody like that. Most artists did not make money, even the ones who were well known.

MASON:: I guess I didn't mean it strictly in economic terms but just in terms of if there was any kind of institutional support for young artists. I mean, was the Oakland Museum—? Was E. J. Montgomery at the Oakland Museum?

JACKSON:: No, that wasn't until the seventies. No, you see, at that time there wasn't even such a thing. That word didn't even exist, "institutional support." It was only about individual artists, like master teachers working with individual artists, and even in a state school, which has changed now. It's like the state schools turn out hundreds and thousands of people who think they're artists when they leave school. And you don't even become an artist—I'm not an artist yet. I'm a painter. And I draw, and I work in theater as an "artist person," in quotes. But to become an artist takes a whole lifetime.

MASON:: What's your definition? Well, not your definition. What are your ideas?

JACKSON:: Well, it's like I keep going back to Hokusai, and I go back to some Asian quotations that have to do with when you get to be maybe forty-three you begin to look and see what the birds and the wind are about maybe, and then when you get to be about fifty or sixty years old you make your first line on the paper, and then when you get to be in your eighties you make the first brush stroke, and then when you get to be a hundred you begin to sort of recognize something that you can start putting down as a message. And by the time you get to be a hundred and three, you see everything, and you begin to really paint or draw or write, and you become more wise by then. And then you can—

MASON:: And then you die.

JACKSON:: Yes. And then maybe you can call yourself an artist. Being an artist, or attempting to become an artist, is about a whole process. And it's about solving problems. It's not about just making an image that's cute or not thought out. It's like from the very first line you put on the paper or the very first piece of armature or thing that you put into a piece of sculpture or words for a piece of poetry, that's only a part of a process of solving some kind of a problem. That's what it should be as opposed to thinking, "I'm making this because I'm going to get x number of dollars for this. And I'm going to turn out a bunch of this like I'm a crank or I'm a machine. I'm a printing press, and I'm just going to crank these out. And I'm going to run down to the mall, and I'm going to sell these things." It's a total lifestyle as well. I think that is what we were really there learning as students. We were also being exposed to other artists who are instructors who had a lifestyle because they believed in what they were doing, who were experimenting with materials and with ideas and with what they learned from history but also making something of their own as opposed to imitating somebody else. A lot now is just imitation of somebody else, and it's sort of mindless imitation without even understanding where it comes from. And I'm not sure that a lot of black artists have any inclination as to what their history is, what history of art is in general.

MASON:: What do you think happened? I mean maybe that's a question to ask later after—

JACKSON:: Well, it's like what Cecil was talking about this morning, about an artist who had come to visit him who had just gotten a $20,000 commission. But he walked into Cecil's house to live with him and stay with him. And looking at a work, he asked him, "Well, who is this artist?" It was a Charles White. I mean, you know, it's like, how do you not know Elizabeth Catlett? And how do you not know Jacob Lawrence, especially if you're a black artist? There is no way that we can exist, because we owe a great deal to these people as teachers. There is no way, for example, if you meet a white artist who's going to walk into a place and not know Picasso or know Josef Albers or know [Robert] Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. That's rare. It's very bizarre. You know, it's typical. We need to know everything. My experience in college was kind of—at one point it was like living Fame. I was living Fame before the movie came about, because all I did was dance and paint and write. And it was in a sense for me kind of a socialization period in a way, even though I wasn't very social. But I learned a number of things because of the—as I was mentioning, the average age of people there was thirty-three. So there were a lot of ideas that were sort of knocked about. And also I was—a couple of friends I had who were poets were actually from [University of California] Berkeley, so I spent time kind of running back and forth across the bay to Berkeley and sitting in cafes and coffee houses with discussions in them and being exposed to music.

MASON:: Were they similar atmospheres, Berkeley and—?

JACKSON:: Well, because San Francisco State was a commuter college, a lot of the black students who were in social work and psychology sort of spent time together, because they played cards in the commons. But I didn't play cards; I still don't play cards. And I didn't feel like sitting around for hours just playing cards. And most of them also belonged to sororities and fraternities, so that was kind of a social life for them. But because I was always in rehearsals, I didn't get into that social life in college. For me it was going to poetry readings and coffee houses and listening to jazz and listening to, for example—you know, there wasn't really new music, but there was. That's where John Cage and Darius Milhaud, who was an instructor at Mills College and a composer—and through dance also listening to new forms of music or innovative music, because dancers quite often use music of composers who are around. They get together with somebody, and it's formed right there on the spot. So I was more interested in those kinds of things. I think if I had never been exposed to people I would probably—well, I did. I grew up listening to the wind and water and animals and leaves. So that's a form of music, and those are the things that I would be drawn to anyway, no matter who I was spending any time with.

MASON:: So would you say that a lot of your ideas—? Firstly, how could you leave such an ideal setting to go to L.A. ? But would you say that most of your ideas were pretty much in place by the time you got to L.A. ? Had they been formed in San Francisco and Alaska?

JACKSON:: Well, the reason I left the Bay Area was because when I graduated—I think I mentioned I was working at the post office.

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: The post office was ideal because—and by then I had my own apartment, kind of an apartment-studio on Duboce Street. And I auditioned for Music Circus [Sacramento and Fresno Civic Light Operas] and moved to Sacramento. And then from Sacramento we were in Los Angeles, I think, for a while and then went off to Mexico, to rehearse in Mexico, to go to South America. And my friend who—she was engaged. We danced together here in San Francisco, in the Bay Area. Wilma Alexander was her name. We danced with Kelly Marie Berry and other people. She was studying at the San Francisco Ballet at the time. And it turned out Wilma and I, we really didn't know each other as babies, but our parents knew each other when we were one and two years old over in the Bay View district. Because her dad was a musician. His name was Duke Alexander. We met when we were eighteen and nineteen and danced with a company here with a black choreographer. That's when we also danced with Lynwood Morris, who was from the Dunham [Dance] Company. We were all in a company together here. She and some other people that my parents knew from over in the Bay View district and her mother had been living in Los Angeles for years, and they were all part of a family that lived down there. So it was a kind of a coming together by accident. And it was only because my mother saw her picture in the newspaper that we made the connection that she was the child of these people that we knew. So she was trying to convince me to come to Los Angeles, and I did. My first visit to Los Angeles when I was eighteen and nineteen was to visit with her. But I hadn't planned to move there. That was the last place in the world I would move. MASON Why?

JACKSON:: Because Los Angeles is awful. It's ugly. I mean, who wants to live there? It still is ugly. But especially if you lived in the Bay Area and there was so much happening here. And there was no art in Los Angeles.

MASON:: What about Venice?

JACKSON:: Venice existed as a community. There was no art in Venice at that time. It was just a community with canals. The canals I think at that point were maybe beginning—they still existed. When I first moved to Los Angeles the canals were still there, but then later I guess they drained them all off or something. But the art community didn't exist in Venice. That was sort of a new thing that happened. It did in the sense that there were artists there, just as there are always artists everywhere. And they are there quietly. Just like downtown Los Angeles, there were a lot of artists, but people didn't know that. My first studio was $40 a month. And there was a bunch of people down there, but it was not as known as the community in Venice. The only reason I ended up in Los Angeles is because of my friend Wilma and because the guy that her boyfriend, fiance, husband, had introduced me to—his name was Phillip Jackson. He lived in Echo Park. He had this little cabin with a sheepherder's wagon as a kitchen. I came back through, and Phillip and I sort of decided to get together. It was only because of that and also because that was my opportunity to be on my own territory as opposed to being in town with my parents. My mother had her own set of ideas about how she thought I should be living. My father was pretty easygoing about it. Pretty much what I wanted to do, he was very supportive about it. But my mother had set ideas about how a woman was supposed to behave and what you were supposed to do.

MASON:: She expected you to get married and have kids?

JACKSON:: Yeah, but be married to the right person that she wanted me to be married to at the time. Her idea when we moved from Alaska was that—because she grew up in St. Louis in a community where everybody knew each other, she was not open, for example, if I had a boyfriend in college—I didn't have very—we really sort of spent a lot of time together, because when you work in theater you have friends; you don't really have boyfriends, girlfriends. At that time we didn't. And in dance—

MASON:: Go out in one big group?

JACKSON:: Yeah, together. If you did go out with one person—it was just sort of like friends more than anything. There wasn't the sex that people expect at State [College]. There just wasn't that. But she had an ideal. If it was a black guy that I went out with, if she didn't know the family, you just don't go out with people when you don't know their families. That was her idea. Or my Greek friend [Thanasis Maskaleris]. My father just thought, "Oh, my God, he looked like Jesus Christ." He had a beard, and he looked like a beatnik. But they were just friends. All we did was we all spent a lot of time together. But I learned a lot from them, my classmates. It was okay. We were just friends. My mother didn't mind me going out places with them, because we'd go to the [San Francisco] Art Institute parties and the beach and stuff like that. But I needed my own space and my own territory. And historically my parents were known in the Bay Area, because they worked in the community, and they'd owned businesses, and they'd have restaurants, and they worked to help to get a lot of people to register to vote. My father, being in real estate, when he came back, he was really surprised that a lot of people were still living in those housing projects from the war times. Their life was not better from when they were originally there, when they were working and they had money and things and it was segregation times. They were still living there just out of habit as opposed to moving on into another situation. So my father helped a lot of people get their finances together to buy houses. It was to his benefit and theirs, too, even though a lot of times he put his commission up to help them put up their down payments. So they worked a lot in the community just to get people going, to get black people in their communities.

MASON:: Were they involved in the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]?

JACKSON:: Not really. They were more involved in—when I say community—like my father, he actually helped organize the Ingleside-Ocean View community project, which is all down in Ocean Avenue and all that Ingleside community that's there. What he did was just get people organized with their businesses and with the [San Francisco] City Council and be recognized as a community with some needs within that community and that they were a constituency that people really needed to pay attention to. Because there were all kinds of people living in that community, not just black people and white people. There were Asians and Filipinos. So he sort of worked on that. And my parents worked together doing those things. My mother—they made their businesses available for voters registration, kind of getting the kids together in the community. And I think this is relevant because basically what I am is from my parents. Just the things that we took for granted that we did as people in my family—they just did things. They didn't have other people initiate them. Or if it was needed, then they just decided, "Okay, let's do this, and we will call some other people, and we'll make this thing happen." I think I got a lot of that from them, you know, in doing that. But basically, when I got to Los Angeles, it was really an accident. And I arrived because of my friends. Echo Park was a neat community to live in, because it really was a sort of Bohemian multicultural area. And it was beautiful. And on the one side was Chavez Ravine, where the history there was that they had moved out this whole Mexican community in order to build Elysian Park, the baseball field. So that was big historically in Los Angeles—there is a real deep history there with some people, people being moved out. And I think there were some murders and riots that happened in that area. So Echo Park was the next community over. Now Echo Park is almost all Mexican, so in a sense they've reclaimed their own neighborhood, which is really fantastic. And I didn't realize how tiny those houses were until I was there earlier this year looking at the old places where we'd lived. Where we'd lived was on a side of a hill in this little cabin with woods all around.

MASON:: So people would share houses?

JACKSON:: No, not that many would share. I mean, I think the rent was probably either $65 or $90 a month. Rents were really cheap in those days. When I finally did get a house in Los Angeles, after I had my studio for $40 a month, I had a big, three-bedroom house with two bathrooms and a huge yard for $150 a month. My studio space, the one at Jefferson [Boulevard] and Main [Street] was five thousand square feet for $150 a month. That's why it's been traumatic for me to finally settle in a space, looking all over the country, where they want $1,000, $1,500, a month for studio spaces smaller than what I had. To finally settle in this space for $750 a month is more than I would want to pay, but I know this is what the norm is now. And it's the cheapest space for what I'm getting. To me it's a really good deal now.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1992

JACKSON:: As far as the aesthetic that was concerned, I think the aesthetic was—

MASON:: This is at San Francisco State?

JACKSON:: Yeah, at San Francisco State. It was finding an aesthetic of your own, but as a student doing what a student should do, which is learning technically what the paint is about, what the sculpture is about. Drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing and gaining technical skills with the different kinds of materials that were available to work with, which is a starting point as a student. And the equivalent that you get when you think you've been there for four years in college and you're studying other academics and doing other things, probably what you're getting even as we were in the studio almost—we were in the studio every day. You could be in that building from seven or eight o'clock in the morning until eleven, twelve o'clock at night. That's how the studios were open then for us. We talked aesthetics as much as we could, being young people. But what we knew was when we came out we didn't come out expecting that we were artists. We wanted to be artists. But now students come out thinking they're artists and thinking they have the right to come out and immediately turn out a five-page resume with a bunch of student exhibitions on it. I mean, Arthur [Monroe] and I have talked about this for years. I've actually seen students who've only been out of school for two years, and they have three- or four-page resumes. I mean, I've been painting and exhibiting since my first exhibit in 1961, you know, which is me as a dummy not realizing that—

MASON:: Oh, yeah.

JACKSON:: But I've been exhibiting for that long, officially since 1968. And some of these people, they exhibit in every mall and every gallery and every turn and every corner. Every time they made a painting they made an exhibit, and they've got them all listed on their resumes. I didn't have a resume, I don't think, until I think the 1970s, maybe. I don't know whether it was the [Ankrum] Gallery that sort of put together something or—somewhere in there maybe someone asked for one at a museum exhibition or something. They asked for all the exhibits listed that I had been in and a biography. But I had been an artist, or at least working trying to become an artist, by then at least ten years before I even put anything down on paper to say what I had done.

MASON:: So do you think that the art schools are kind of overdoing it?

JACKSON:: Yes.

MASON:: Or that they are trying to present something to the public in order to justify their existence?

JACKSON:: That's exactly right. What's happened is that everything has been all turned up. The eighties are an example of a lot of misturned and misguided—and not just in the art fields but in everything, the overcommercialization of everything. And as a result we have a lot of—when I went to the art store the other day, this women was telling me—because I was saying, "Everything is so expensive here. It's like I can't buy anything." And she said, "Sometimes we have sales, because there are a lot of rich kids, rich people, who come through and they buy everything on the list that's given them from the art school, where they give you a list of what you need." And I said, "When I was in art school we had to share." I mean, Charles White told us stories of how he and—I forget the other two guys. I think it might have been Jacob Lawrence, and I forget who the third artist was. The three of them were at Art Institute [of Chicago] at the same time, and none of them had any money. They had six brushes amongst the three of them and maybe a few tubes of paint and some crayons. And they would arrange their classes so that one person could use the pencils and the other could use the paints and the brushes and somebody else did something else. Anyway, sometimes these people decide, oh, well, after a year this is not what they really want to do. They'd rather go become an engineer or something where they are going to make a lot of money. And they have sales, and they sell their art supplies. I mean, I still have art supplies from—I have a little box of metallic oil pastels that I bought at San Francisco State. And I think the person, it was a mistake when they sold [them to] me, because the box said thirty-nine cents on the outside, and when they went through the checkstand—I didn't notice, but—I realized when I got out, but I didn't say a word. I think she only charged me thirty-nine cents. Well, I think each one of those sticks in there was supposed to be thirty-nine cents each, which I wouldn't have been able to afford. But it got through. And I still have that box with these sort of gnarled-up pieces of oil pastel. But that's just the kind of respect you have for the supplies you have. It's like the good paintbrushes; you sort of carry them around lovingly, because it's your life. But it was about a lifestyle and a life that really was about solving problems, experimenting. And you didn't necessarily show everything that you put a line on in the studio; you got rid of things. That's why for me, every moment that I lived in Los Angeles—and for years people would hear me say, "I just really want to have time to just paint and not sell the works or have people come and buy the work away," because you don't have time to look at what you've been doing. One of the things I appreciated with Ankrum Gallery was that the first couple of shows I had—the first show was a moderate size. Then, because I was painting so large, when I moved back to Los Angeles, after my son [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi] was born and I had that huge studio space, the shows I had were really big. I mean, it was like big paintings. It took up the whole gallery. Well, they decided that too many of the artists were having these huge shows and that it was really better to cut back. And they also didn't encourage the artist to have shows every two years. I think at first just as exposure—but their whole point was that the younger artists came in, and they didn't sell their art for a lot of money. It was better for people to collect the work because they really liked it and they could afford it. Then your work was around. They also discouraged the artist from wanting to just make art to sell. They felt that you needed to spend time developing works. They would prefer to show a few good works as opposed to many and you'd have an uneven exhibition, because it meant the work really wasn't developed. So they put some restraints on their artists in a sense. They were very supportive. As I think I mentioned to you yesterday, I moved because I got married in 1970, at the end of Gallery 32. I moved back up to the Bay Area. Because Pete [M. Mhunzi, nee Walter Preston Smith] was just kind of a jerk. But anyway, then I moved back to Los Angeles in '72, and that's when I moved into the studio space that I had, the big one on Jefferson and Main. And the Ankrums [Joan Ankrum and William Challee] then really saw, I guess, that I was still really serious about being a painter, so they actually gave me a little sort of allowance for almost a year, which helped me pay my rent and helped me to be able to paint. It wasn't a lot of money, but I didn't need a lot of money when your rent is only $150. I actually got my father to take me to the president of the Bank of America that he knew over here on Taraval Avenue in San Francisco. And I said, you know, all these white boys do it. They go out and they get their fathers to take them for something that they need to a friend of their father's who's in business. So I just said, "Daddy, you know this man who's the president of a bank, and I need a loan, because I want the studio space. I need $2,000. And I will pay the money. But since you know him, can you take me? And maybe he will give me a loan." And at the time that was really outrageous to do that. Nobody just goes to a bank and says, "Give me money for a studio space, a loft space." It was the key money to get into the space. And my father said, "Well, okay. We'll go." And my father vouched for me and said, "Well, yes, she pays her bills."

MASON:: They didn't ask for any collateral or anything?

JACKSON:: In a sense my father was the collateral. I mean, he had a reputation. The man had done a lot of real estate dealings with my father. I knew that, and I figured, "Well, this is something that I really want. I want this studio space. I have to have it. If I'm going to be able to paint, I have to have this space." And only $2,000 down, and it included a bunch of antique books and rugs. All the people who had been in the studio space before me left things. The people who were living there had a bunch of furniture they didn't want, because they were moving to a new house and they wanted a different lifestyle. So they left all their antique furniture and—

MASON:: So you didn't really need any start-up cost?

JACKSON:: Well, the start-up was just that key money to get in, for all the things they had repaired and built. That was the old way that it was done. You moved into a studio, you paid key money to the people who had made the repairs on the space already. Now that has evolved into this whole thing where an artist takes a master lease on a building. Like this building, for example. The guy who has the master lease lives off in the country somewhere, and he collects a percentage off of all of us who pay here. And the landlord is the man who put all these old people in San Francisco out into the street. And they still haven't built a new building or a new complex for where they put out all the older people. So it's become this big business of live-work spaces as opposed to places—now the problem is having to get the places up to legal standard for people to live in them because of earthquakes and all that. But at the time my first studio space, being underground in a basement of a Victorian house in Los Angeles for $40 a month—the five-thousand-square-foot space was in very good condition, it was on the top floor, for $150. But I paid back that loan. I think it was something like—I don't remember what it was a month, but I was getting—I had an income of probably about $280, which took care of the loan, it took care of feeding my son, it took care of paying the rent. And then I sold some paintings. The Ankrum sold some paintings, and I'd be able to buy art supplies. So whenever I sold a painting I'd just turn it back into art supplies. I haven't sold any paintings in a number of years because I haven't been showing. I haven't seen my collectors. And as I mentioned, most of them had kids who had to go through college at $60,000 a year each. This whole recession has really been bizarre for some people. For other artists it's been good, because they've been out there and exposed. I went off to the country because I didn't want to be in Los Angeles anymore. And each time I sort of disappear it's because I really am trying to get to the essence of what I think my work is supposed to be about. And I really want to be able to make a large body of work where I get to see what it is I'm doing and really develop it.

MASON:: When you moved to Los Angeles, you didn't like it, but you were still working. So how did being in Los Angeles sort of impact the work that you wanted to do? For example, you didn't make any more sculpture, right?

JACKSON:: Well, when I moved to Los Angeles, I was moving there after having spent a year working with Music Circus and going to South America as a dancer. So there was kind of a year period where basically I was just writing in journals and doing little works. I wasn't really working as a painter, because that came almost immediately after graduating. The old way used to be that you graduated from college, or your third year in college you went off to Europe or somewhere like that and hitchhiked or explored, and then you came back and finished school. Or when you graduated you went off to a foreign country. Well, it was a fortunate thing for me that I was hired to do that. So I went off to South America. And when I came back to Los Angeles, I hadn't really been working as an artist because I didn't have studio space, and I was living with a friend and doing some painting there. But in a sense that was an imposition in his house; it was just very small. And then, when I did get my own space—I think I started working at the post office, because I transferred from the San Francisco post office down here, because that's where I was working before I got the job as a dancer. So I was able to transfer to the post office down here. Then from there I was told there were some provisional jobs for teachers. They were short of teachers in Los Angeles, so they were looking for anybody—surfers, artists, you know, weirdo types—to come and fill in. You would student teach three to six weeks. They would give you a provisional credential, and you taught in grade school. So I got a first- and second-grade class. It wasn't that I didn't like Los Angeles when I got there. I was just happy because I had a couple of friends and I was on my own. It was the last place I expected to be. There wasn't as much smog then, so it was just a place where basically some friends that I truly loved were there and it was okay. Then I guess I must have been making like $450 a month, which was a lot of money, although it was half of what I made when I was touring South America. But that's because it was out of the country and that was special. But it didn't matter. I made enough to rent this big, old Spanish house, the first floor, for $150 a month, which was a lot of money to pay for rent then. And I had an Afghan, and I had an old Jaguar that I had bought from my Greek friend. And people had this little attitude about me. My Echo Park friends said now I was "Miss Ritz," right? Which is really kind of dumb considering when I look back and think I was making $430, $450 a month. You could just do a lot with that, especially not having children or anything like that. And I had sort of a studio in that apartment, that first house that I had. Because I'd had the underground studio space. And at that point, I think it was 1968, which was actually before that, before having that house when I was in Echo Park. Then the same guy, Malcolm Lubliner, the one who came by—

MASON:: The photographer?

JACKSON:: Yeah. He came by, and he may be the one who mentioned to me that they had an art exhibition at Watts for the Watts [Summer] Festival [of Art]. And I thought, well, maybe I'll enter my paintings. These were a couple of paintings that I had done toward the end of art school, where I had actually by then sort of established a style. I had gone back to some things I'd done in poster contests where I had won scholarships when I graduated from high school, but they were of kind of Beatles-looking characters, white people. There were three paintings, and they were all white people.

MASON:: Were they realistically done?

JACKSON:: They were figurative and kind of a soft washiness. Nobody had seen painting like that before. You know, it was a different style of painting. And they were large. I put them in the Watts Festival, and the next thing I heard from them was that I'd sold one of the paintings for $300.

MASON:: Do you know to whom?

JACKSON:: It was to a man—and somewhere—I don't know that I have those files now. I may have lost those files. But the man was—I don't know if he lived in Laguna Beach or where he was from. I think he may have lived down in Laguna Beach. But anyway, I wonder if I remember this woman's name—anyway, a group of women from Laguna Beach Museum of Art called us and said that they wanted us to exhibit. They said they wanted me to be in an exhibition at the Laguna Beach art museum.

MASON:: They wanted to take the whole exhibition?

JACKSON:: No, they chose some artists. They chose David Hammons, Dan Concholar, Alonzo Davis, there was me, there may have been John Outterbridge, John Riddle.

MASON:: I know on that same one Wilbur Haynie and Marvin Harden also exhibited there.

JACKSON:: Could be. I don't remember all the artists, because—when I had my file cabinet with all my stuff in it, I could go right to these things and give you better information. But, yeah, we were all in that exhibition. And at the time I had split up with Phil Jackson. I was with this Armenian dentist [Donald Missirlian]. So we went down to Laguna Beach. He drove me down there to the opening. And nobody knew me. I had met Alonzo in Echo Park because—there was an artist there named Robert Gore, who had a couple of daughters. He'd built his house on the side of a hill, and they were getting ready to go to Europe. When we went over to the sale that they were having of stuff and art supplies in his house, Alonzo was there, and I met Alonzo at the house. So Alonzo was really the only artist that I knew out of the whole group. They wanted to know about me, because I guess they wanted to know, "Who is this woman who would show all these painting of these white people at the Watts Festival?"

MASON:: [laughs] After the Watts uprising!

JACKSON:: Yeah. It was like, "Is she for real?" Let's see. When I was in San Francisco—I guess in '65, when they had the Watts uprising, it was all on the front page. And the only thing I knew about Watts was the Watts Towers as art pieces. I didn't realize or understand that there was a whole black community that lived around there. I knew what the artwork was that was there. I could tell you a whole bunch of artwork in L.A. and where it was. So when they said, "Look, Watts is burning," I thought it was the Watts Towers that were burning. I didn't realize it was a community. And somebody looked at me and said, "Are you crazy? Are you for real? You don't know this?" Well, I didn't know. I had grown up in Alaska, and I had just recently come here. So when I went down, I guess they thought I was really pretty brazen showing these paintings. And they thought it was some little white girl. I'm sure that's what they all thought. It's like, "Who is she?" And then later, I think it was around 1968—it was in the summer after I had been teaching and I had some money—I took Charles White's drawing class at Otis Art Institute. And that was incredible, because it really kind of tightened up my drawing. I felt very proud, because here was Charles White, and this was this man we had seen in this booklet. Because they had told me Charles White was going to be teaching. It was Malcolm again who'd come through talking to us. He said, "Well, Charles White teaches this class at the Otis Art Institute." And that got me so excited. "Oh, I can study with Charles White!" Well, there was Dan Concholar in the class at the time, I think, and David Hammons was in the class, and so was Alonzo [Davis], and I think Timothy Washington, maybe, and none of them would speak to me. None of them talked to me. Charles White would talk to me. And I—

MASON:: Was it because of those paintings they wouldn't talk to you?

JACKSON:: No, they just didn't talk to me because I was a woman, I was a girl. So how could I seriously—? This was before a lot of their attitude changed when we got to that Black Mirror exhibition [at the Woman's Building], where they really were very supportive of the women artists. Because there are so few of us as black artists. It wasn't male and it wasn't female, we were just black artists together. But at the time they just probably thought I was—who knows? I was, as my friend Rosalind [Kent Goddard] said, I was kind of wispy-airy.

MASON:: But they must have known about Elizabeth Catlett. She is a woman artist who's very serious.

JACKSON:: At the time I don't think a lot of us knew about Elizabeth Catlett yet. But I wasn't Elizabeth Catlett; I was just this girl in class, so I couldn't be in the same league with Elizabeth Catlett. Even now I wouldn't be in the same league with Elizabeth Catlett. But yeah. So they just sort of watched. And then they found out I guess that I could draw. They still didn't pay much attention. And then I think I must have—I don't know whether David might have said hello one day. I must have asked David. And I don't know how it was David, how I asked, or how we even got to talk, but I asked about studio spaces. Because I said that I had to move from where I was living, and I needed to find a studio space. Because they were selling the property that I was living in. My father even came down. "I should buy this piece of property." They were putting it up for auction. It was like $24,000 that they wanted at that time, which was—the same house, I believe, Betty Gold, who was the curator at the L.A. [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] bought for $250,000. But I had a choice to make. I could buy the house and remain a teacher for the rest of my life, or I could not buy it and I could paint. So that was the choice I made. I lived in a motel for about a month with my dog and cat until I found the space on Lafayette Park Place, where Gallery 32 was. And I went in there because David, I think, had told me to look around Chouinard [Art Institute], around the lake that's there, MacArthur Park lake. So I was looking around the Chouinard studios, and I saw this beautiful building. The Granada Building it was called. It had the spaces downstairs and was like a storefront or a really lovely workplace. A lot of architects, and I think there were some attorneys and designers in the building, and then upstairs was a little apartment kind of space. Originally, evidently, the building had been like a dormitory for women in probably the twenties or thirties. And some man who had been to Spain loved some building in Granada, and he came back and duplicated exactly the same building. It had a fish pond downstairs, and it had a rickety old iron elevator, which reminded me of an elevator I had been in in the hotel that I lived in in Montevideo, which was called the L'Alhambra. So that was kind of, well, this was the place. I had to have this. That was $150 a month for that space. And I knew the women wouldn't know the difference between a studio or gallery, so I went in and I said I would like to open up a gallery, a studio. And I kept interchanging the words. "Well, I'd like to have this studio—." Because I knew if I wanted to just go in and paint she probably wouldn't rent it to me. And as it turned out, because I was a teacher—I guess they checked that out, so it meant I had an income. I had previously been paying the same amount of money for rent. So I got the space like that. And I really hadn't planned to start a gallery; I was getting studio space. Then one of my friends from here and from school in San Francisco, David Swanson, had a friend [Gordon Dipple] in Santa Barbara who was a jewelry maker-painter. We kind of all talked about—and David had collected a lot of Tiffanys. People used to just throw Tiffany lamps and things, stained glass, out on the street here, and then you'd find them on McAllister Street and second-hand stores. A lot of black people had them in their secondhand stores. David was running around collecting. For $65, $45, he'd buy up these little Tiffany lamps and antique glass and stuff. And he had a really neat little apartment up near 31 Flavors, up on Nob Hill, when that was the only 31 Flavors there was, there was only one. No, it was a—was it Baskin Robbins? It was an ice cream store, anyway, that was up there with really good ice cream. Swenson's Ice Cream, that was what it was, up on Hyde Street. But anyway, David had a pretty little apartment up there, and he collected all these beautiful things. We would go to antique stores together. And usually I only had a little bit of money, so I could only afford—I bought some cobalt candle sticks, which I put on layaway. But we talked about the space I had and how beautiful it was. And he suggested then, "Why don't you start a gallery?" Then we had letters that he wrote back and forth to me. And he said, "Well, I hope you don't plan to start a black art gallery."

MASON:: Meaning—?

JACKSON:: And I thought, "What's a black art gallery?" And he said, "I only say that because it seems to be the trend." I didn't know about it. I had no idea. He said the gallery ought to be just for everyone. "You should have a gallery just mixed with all your friends and not just try to have a black art gallery." And it never had occurred to me.

MASON:: What year was that?

JACKSON:: This was 1968.

MASON:: So what other black galleries were there in that era?

JACKSON:: Well, Alonzo had a gallery [Brockman Gallery] and there was a gallery here in San Francisco called Black Man's [Art] Gallery. Joseph Geran Jr. and Juba Sola, he had a gallery here, which was just a little bitty room, probably not bigger than this room right here. Yeah, he had opened that gallery.

MASON:: Did Samella Lewis have her gallery around?

JACKSON:: No, not then. That opened later. Because Alonzo's gallery showed people like Samella and—well, the saying used to be that Alonzo's gallery showed all the people with master's degrees, and my gallery would be anything and anybody that fell off the street. So it's like the first exhibition I had was actually Timothy Washington, David Swanson, and Gordon Dipple—that's who the artist was from Santa Barbara—because those were the only two people I knew. I don't know how Timothy got in. Somehow I met Timothy. Maybe it was Timothy and not David who had told me about—maybe between Timothy and David, they were the ones who had told me about looking for spaces. And Timothy may have been the first one to come by. David sort of always roamed in and out. He could appear anywhere. So David might have been one of the first people also to come into the space. And between the two of them they probably told other people, "There's this woman who's going to start a gallery over in this place off of Wilshire [Boulevard]. I don't know how she expects to have any business in this place where there is nobody." It wasn't in the black community; it wasn't in the white community. It wasn't in Venice. It wasn't on La Cienega [Boulevard]. But my experience had been that, well, in San Francisco there are galleries in Victorian houses, there are galleries stuck in places, and people still go. In New York City people go into bizarre places to an art gallery. So from what I knew of where galleries were, I didn't think it was any big thing. And besides that, the art schools were around the corner, Chouinard and Otis. And it was a pretty space. It was a pretty place to have my studio. That's all I was really concerned about.

MASON:: So the last two artists, I don't know them. Are they white?

JACKSON:: Gordon Dipple—yeah, they were white artists David I went to school with, and the other artist was a friend of David's from up in Santa Barbara who had Mrs. [Katherine W.] Tremaine as a patron. Mrs. Tremaine is an art collector, very well-known art collector, from Santa Barbara, who I think is probably on some of the boards of the museums, the L. A. County and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. I was teaching and trying to run the gallery, and I was teaching on a double shift. So I would go to work at six thirty in the morning. My class would start at seven thirty, and the kids would be finished with school by twelve thirty, then I would dash to the gallery and open it up by one o'clock. It was open from one to seven. And my dog would sort of sleep there and guard the gallery. But as soon as the door was closed at seven, that's when he became a watchdog. He knew people could roam in and out. And then whenever he needed to go out and go relieve himself, he would just walk out of the building and go down to the park. But that was the first exhibit.

MASON:: What kind of work were they—?

JACKSON:: Well, Gordon basically showed his handcrafted jewelry, which was really exquisite. It was like a lot of silver and some gold with semiprecious stones. David was a painter, abstract expressionist painter. And then Timothy had a big piece of sculpture. Somewhere in one of these journals—it was a piece that opened up. It had a big hand. And it may be in my things that I have in Los Angeles, that I have—I have that.

MASON:: I was just curious. Did you think that they all sort of went together somehow? Or was it just that—?

JACKSON:: Well, they were three people I knew, and interestingly enough, the work was very striking together. And I had this beautiful old hospital—probably it was like a display case for medicines. It was a big iron thing on rollers that was glass, and it was perfect for showing the jewelry. And I could lock it. And then Timothy's sculpture was really imposing; it was a huge piece. And then David's paintings, and some of Gordon's other painting too. Timothy was doing I think the drawings and some of the etched pieces on metal that he was doing during the early work. So it was really a nice exhibition. And what I did was just mail to people who were on my list from Actors Equity [Association] and from the theater people I knew and film people. They had mailing lists. So we mailed to those people on that mailing list. Because it was nonprofit, I discovered that I could do a public service on the radio, because there was no charge.

MASON:: You got it sort of incorporated as a nonprofit?

JACKSON:: No. No, I'd never heard of any of that. We just opened up a space. I didn't do anything except I found a printer down the street, a French guy named Jacques Cartier, I think was his name. His last name was Cartier. I had written out the announcement, and he said, "Why don't we just print it out like this?" I wanted it on yellow paper, because yellow to me was like a good luck thing. And we had brown ink. I think it was a threefold thing where Timothy's image was there and then the announcement of the exhibition. Then I had an invitation card for the opening of the gallery that was inside there. And we mailed that out. And at that time I think that postage was something like four cents each. So I mailed out maybe only a thousand then. The mailing list grew to be about two thousand. And I would always hand address and hand stamp them, because I thought it was very personal, and people should receive something by hand and not with a label that has been electronically produced. And interestingly enough, the opening, I guess through word of mouth—and I didn't know at the time, I think Alonzo's gallery may have had an opening the same night or the night before. What happened was that usually Alonzo's openings would be on Friday nights and mine would be on Saturday. So the word of mouth would go back and forth. We were really good for each other, because it was like a positive competition. And I think when I closed my gallery, Alonzo thought that means all the people will come over to his gallery now. But as it turned out there wasn't that bouncing back and forth, that kind of positive competitiveness that goes on where they want to see what's happening at this gallery, they want to see what's happening at the next.

MASON:: Were there people who were interested in a certain kind of work who wouldn't go to your gallery?

JACKSON:: No. Well, they did go back and forth. What they did was that when there were two galleries there was more—it was kind of like an excitement of being able to go see what are they doing here, what are they doing there. And as I mentioned earlier, the thing we all said as a joke was that Alonzo had the more established black artists—because he showed Samella and he showed Bill [William] Pajaud and artists like that—and at my gallery anything could happen. I mean, we got together as a bunch of women and decided to have The Sapphire Show. That was Sue Irons, who is Senga Ngudi, and there was Yvonne Cole Meo, Gloria Bohanon, Betye Saar, there was me, and—what's her name?

MASON:: Was it that South African woman?

JACKSON:: Abdulrashid, Eileen Abdulrashid, now Eileen Nelson, who was not South African, she was from here. She had been married to an Arab, I think.

MASON:: I was thinking of—you told me Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor.

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah. She's actually from the United States. Her father was South African, from Johannesburg. No she wasn't in that one. Because just had the pure black women, the sapphires. Even though we weren't all pure black women. We were all mixed, right? Like Betye is mixed. So we did that show. One time Elizabeth had an exhibition [Leigh-Taylor]. I think Elizabeth may have come either to my first or second exhibition. I'm trying to remember what the second exhibition was that I had. Oh, it's in the book. Wait a minute. Where's that book? Did I put it back?

MASON:: Oh, the signature book.

JACKSON:: Oh, there it is. That tells you right there. Yeah, there were people—it's like the first guest was an old friend of my mother's from St. Louis. So that was the first. That was March 19, 1969. And then for some weird reason I didn't say what these exhibitions were until later. Later on I guess I started labeling so we'd know what these things were. I can sort of tell by who was there.

MASON:: Charles White came, too. Did he come a lot?

JACKSON:: He did. Because he could come from right around the corner when he was teaching at Otis. A lot of these people, some of them were architects and some of them were people who worked in the area. And they really kind of liked it, because it meant that they could just stop in in the middle of the afternoon instead of going off to do other things. But a lot of graphic artists and architects and some business people. That's interesting. I didn't mark what these were in the beginning. See, back here is where I started to say what it was. This was Contextures: [American Abstract Art. 1945-1978]. When we did the fundraiser for the book, the book party for Linda [Goode] Bryant and Marci Phillips's book. This was the benefit for the gallery. So it's like I wish I had done that in the beginning to know. I think if I went through my files I would know exactly when they were. Then there was a man who came off the street who was from Hawaii. He was an older white man who had these beautiful little pieces that were done with overlays of paint. They were just so exquisite. So he had a show, and he sold a lot of work to a lot of different people.

MASON:: It was painted on canvas?

JACKSON:: No, some of it was just painted on board, on heavyweight construction board. He may have had a couple of canvases. But I remember Bernie [Bernard T.] Casey, I think, bought one of his pieces, and maybe even Claude Booker. It's like people came in, they didn't care. It was really beautiful art. It's like people loved Elizabeth's work. So the gallery was really about work by artists who would not be shown at other places. And it wasn't about making money. Because in the beginning, basically, I just used the money I was making as a teacher to put up. We shared expenses. It's like if the artist sold work, then we would deduct the artist's portion of the expenses from whatever was sold, and the artist got their money. And if the artist didn't sell anything, then sometimes, if I really liked a piece, then I'd either buy a piece or I'd trade it for whatever the expenses were. That's how I sort of began collecting work, since I almost always liked something that the artists were doing.

MASON:: Well, we mentioned a couple of shows the other day. You wanted to talk about the Emory Douglas show that you had.

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah. The funny thing is the way that really began, which is very curious.

MASON:: What year did that happen?

JACKSON:: Oh, let me think. That was the year of the police invading the [Black] Panther headquarters. Oh. This might have been by the end of '69. Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. It must have been at the end of '69, because in between all that was when Angela [Y.] Davis was teaching at UCLA and [Alprentice] "Bunchy" Carter was shot or killed.

MASON:: Yeah, [John] Huggins and Carter were shot by the US Organization.

JACKSON:: Yeah. The interesting thing that happened was that—my friend Wilma Alexander, the one who had talked me into moving to Los Angeles, got married to Calvin Demmon here in the Bay Area, and Wilma lived next to two guys who were gay. They owned a house over in the Fillmore district, a beautiful Victorian next door to her aunt's house. So when she was a little girl growing up there, sometimes she would just crawl across the window and go visit her two friends—I forget their names, Denney and somebody. Anyway, they made their house available for Wilma and Calvin to get married in front of their fireplace in their Victorian here. Well, Wilma's matron of honor was Yvonne, and I don't remember Yvonne's name then. Well, it turned out that by this time—now, that was in 1965 or '66 when Wilma and Calvin got married. Nineteen sixty-six, I guess. No, '67, because I had come back from South America. And time had passed, and from what I knew Yvonne had gone to Seattle to work as a secretary, and that's where she lived. She lived in Seattle, and she was working there. I don't know who called me or how it happened, but somebody called and said, "We'd like to have an exhibition of Emory Douglas's work at your gallery." Maybe this was through Elizabeth; I don't know. It could have been through Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor. And this woman named Yvonne Carter called. She was the liaison person that I was working with and talking with. When she walked into the gallery so we could talk and make plans, my mouth dropped, because here was Yvonne, this sort of middle-class lady, who had been a secretary working in Seattle, and she was Bunchy Carter's wife. I don't know if they were just living together, but she was calling herself Yvonne Carter. And when she walked in, I was really shocked, because she was bigger than she had ever been. She was this tiny woman when she was the matron of honor at Wilma's wedding. She had gained weight. I don't know if she had had a baby or if she just gained weight from all the stress and the trauma. And it turned out that's who it was who was running this exhibition. So I agreed, because I thought it would be sort of fantastic, because it was really sort of right after Elizabeth [Leigh-Taylor] had had her exhibition, which was about the Greek resistance that was going on. Most of her work was about oppressed poor people of the world. I guess they had heard about that exhibition, so they felt that I was the right place to do this exhibit. And when I saw Emory Douglas's work, I was really surprised, because I had only seen his work in the Panther newspaper, his cartoons. He had these really soft, lovely sort of traditional portraits of all the Panther leaders, of Huey [Newton] and of—and then he had the original drawings from the cartoons. And what they wanted to do was—I'm trying to remember whether those were for sale or not. I think posters were for sale and not the original artworks. It was just basically to have an exhibition and to sell posters to help—and the money went to the Black Panthers. They had a children's food program, so that money went for the children's food program, which I felt was perfectly fine, because it was not necessarily going to the Panther Party, it was going to a community project. So I didn't see any way anybody could object to money going to a community project where they were helping the children in the neighborhoods. It wasn't going toward a war—

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1992

MASON:: So we were talking about the [Black] Panther exhibit [at Gallery 32], and you said it was okay because the money wasn't going to furnish guns for the Panthers but food.

JACKSON:: My feeling about it was that a lot of people who may have misunderstood—people in the black community especially who may have not understood what the Panthers were about, especially if they had a chance to meet Emory Douglas—he was the most gentle man. He was a real artist. Even though a lot of us didn't especially like—I mean, his portraits were portraits. They were traditional kind of portraits done in pastels and not terribly exciting except for the fact that they were of these contemporary historical figures.

MASON:: Do you think he was consciously trying to counteract some of the images in the media of like a gun-toting Huey [Newton] and make them more sort of humanized?

JACKSON:: No. Basically, the portraits that he did were portraits that—actually, he was a student of—oh, God, and this man died a few years ago. He was a professor of history in Los Angeles, and he was an artist. Oh, why have I blanked on his name?

MASON:: I think you mentioned that Elton C. Fax book—

JACKSON:: [Herman] Kofi Bailey.

MASON:: Oh.

JACKSON:: Emory Douglas was a student of Kofi Bailey. He was not just an art student but also of history and philosophy, if you want to call it that. And that's how I guess Emory got to know about the gallery as well, through Kofi Bailey, who was considered very militant at the time because of his point of view. He would be like the Leonard Jeffries of Los Angeles in a sense.

MASON:: But the work that he was doing, Kofi Bailey, I think they have some at the Golden State Mutual [Life Insurance Company].

JACKSON:: They could.

MASON:: Doesn't he do like Nigerian images of—?

JACKSON:: He may be doing some newer work now that is that. But at the time basically he was an artist who was studying art, a young man who was studying art who drew. This was considered the serious side of his work as far as his artwork. They were independent, in a sense, of the Panther work. Probably because he had done these portraits, the Panthers may have asked him to do these cartoons, because he could do political cartoons as well. That's how he got into it. What were being shown were those original portraits which were thrown in, which he considered his real artwork, and then the cartoons from the newspaper, the originals, which were kind of interesting to see independent of the newspaper.

MASON:: No, I was talking about Herman Kofi Bailey. Because I didn't associate his work with any sort of social commentary—

JACKSON:: But he was the teacher of Emory Douglas; that's how that happened. I think that basically Emory, because he was very shy and very quiet, would not have pushed himself to do this exhibition. I think it was because of the party and because of Kofi Bailey and because they wanted to raise money for the children's breakfast program that that all came about. Because I was really shocked to see this guy who did these cartoons was just such a quiet person, a really gentle person. But then that became also—when I went out to pick up posters, I went out to the house that was eventually raided by the police. It was just an empty apartment with a few sandbags down on the floor and some newspapers. And a bunch of teenagers were there, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds. So the next thing I knew was that they had raided the Panther headquarters, and they were dragging these young people out on the street under gunfire. They'd thrown tear gas into this place, and they were pointing them out as being these dangerous human beings when, you know, it's like a few weeks or a month before that I had been in there and seen that there was nothing there. The place was empty. They didn't even have furniture in there. They were a bunch of kids. Because all the Panther leaders by that time had been taken off to jail, so for them to be dangerous was a joke. When the Panther exhibition was at the gallery, tons of people came to see it, because in a sense it was—I guess you could call it a safe place for anybody in the community to come and find out what the Panthers were about, where the people felt comfortable coming to the gallery, and they could come any way they wanted to come. They weren't forced—you know, they didn't have anybody asking them if they wanted to buy something or trying to sell them. It wasn't about selling anything. But for me, I felt it was another venue, a way for people to find out about something that was a part of the community but might be frightening them. But on opening night there were people who came into the gallery opening and said, "Well, the police stopped us and told us not to go to that gallery." They were out on the street on Wilshire Boulevard telling people not to come to the gallery, stopping them and asking them where they were going. Or if people asked for directions, they tried to direct them to go someplace else.

MASON:: Did they ever come into the gallery and harass you?

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah, they came. All that did was make people want to come more to the gallery. Oh, no, the police didn't come in, but they were down on the street in front of the building. And then later on that year—well, I know when Elizabeth [Leigh-Taylor] had her exhibition [Leigh-Taylor] at the gallery we had a bomb threat the night we were putting the exhibition up. The two of us were there. We had several calls that night. And after like the third call it was kind of scary, because here we were just the two of us women there alone hanging this exhibition. They were calling us unpatriotic or something, because she was having this exhibition of drawings about oppressed people around the world and because she had a quote from Melina Mercouri in the program about what was happening in Greece at the time. So we were called all kinds of—

MASON:: Communists probably.

JACKSON:: Yeah. There was one black guy who used to run around, and he would be everywhere. He had tons of cameras, expensive cameras, around his neck. He would always be in places, strangely enough. And at one point he came to the gallery photographing people. And he would put certain people together. We realized what he was doing, because he was showing up at places, and he obviously had no job, no money, but he had all this expensive equipment around his neck. We realized that he was probably an informer for the government. The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] came at another time looking for—remember I was telling you when I was a child and we lived in San Francisco, we were on the upstairs floor, second floor, and my neighbors used to come across and eat lunch with me and have dinner? Well, the youngest child in that family, who we called Tootie—this is during Vietnam as well—well, he had by that time grown up, by the time I had the gallery. And I think one time he may have come to the gallery. But all of a sudden one day an FBI agent came into the gallery asking me about him.

MASON:: He identified himself as an FBI agent?

JACKSON:: Yeah, and wanted to know—because he was living in Santa Barbara, supposedly, and wanted to know where he was and what were his whereabouts, because he was a draft dodger. Well, his dad had been in the military, and he had grown up with—well, his dad treated his kids like military, so he didn't want to have anything to do with going to Vietnam. He was a conscientious objector. But I didn't know where he was, I really didn't. He'd come into the gallery one day to see the show, and he'd gone out. And it was great to see him, because the last time I'd seen him he was a little baby, then there he was grown up. So, you know, it was like the FBI coming in for that. There was another time a tax man came in and wanted to tax me for all the artwork that was on the walls. And I said, "Well, how can you tax me for something that according to your system has no value until it's sold? Until all this is sold it has no value, so you can't tax me."

MASON:: And what did he say?

JACKSON:: Well, I convinced him about the tax. I said, "What do you mean you're going to come in and tax me on the value of what all this is?" Because he went around, and he looked at the price list and added it all up. And according to the price list there were like twenty pieces of art in there. Well, it probably came to something like $4,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 or whatever it was, and he was going to tax me on it. And I said, "That is ridiculous. There is nothing here."

MASON:: So are you saying that a lot of this was as a result of the Panther show? Or just an attack on black institutions?

JACKSON:: I think at the time all artists were suspect. All artists had been suspect, especially in this country, for years. The whole [Joseph] McCarthy thing that went down in the fifties—you know, Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White split up basically about the differences of their allegiances. One felt he could do more work here; she felt that she could do more work by leaving the country. And I'm making it very—that's an oversimplification. But basically she was kind of exiled in a sense because she protested with a hangman's noose around her neck. That was the story that I was told. And as a result she was labeled a communist. Well, I guess she was a communist. She left the country and married Francisco Mora. Right after I had that studio space, I guess I went to the National Conference of Artists in Chicago and Washington [D.C.], and Elizabeth Catlett asked me if I would come and study with her in Mexico. I had had a new baby [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi], and I had just borrowed that money with my father's help, and I couldn't go. And I regretted that always, because here I had studied with Charles White, and it would have been almost incredible to be able to go study with Elizabeth Catlett, to have her ask me to come to Mexico. I would have done that at the drop of a hat at any time. And the interesting thing about that is that when I went back up before—it was right after I'd had my son in 1971. I got married in '70 and had him in '71. I went back to San Francisco, and while I was here that's where I met E.J. Montgomery. She evidently was looking for artists to be in the exhibition. I guess I went up in '71. I had my son. I came back to Los Angeles for a few months, and that didn't work later that year with our marriage and everything, so I went back to San Francisco at the end of '71. That's when E.J. called—because I was really depressed by that point—and said, "I've been trying to find you everywhere." I don't know how I bumped into her. I bumped into her somehow. She said, "I've been trying to find you. We're having an exhibition at the Oakland Museum called Black Untitled II/Dimensions of the Figure." She had just become like a consultant to the Oakland Museum. So I did two paintings on the floor in my parents' house on Ocean Avenue, and those were in the exhibition there. And then because of my—how did that happen? Somehow I met Ray Taliafero, or I knew him from way back in the early sixties when we did Fly Blackbird. He was the musical director. He wanted to put together a big black arts festival here. So he asked me to be the arts coordinator. And that's when I sort of went all over the country meeting artists and collecting artwork from about 179 artists altogether—historical artists, cartoonists, and visual artists. And went to the conference. That was one of the conferences. The first conference I think was in Washington, and met artists there and then came back. We put the black expo [Black Quake] together. And then after that is when I moved back to Los Angeles with Rafiki and got the studio space there.

MASON:: Okay. I'm a little confused.

JACKSON:: Yeah, it probably sounds better on the tape when you get it all together. What happened was that—let's see. The Gallery 32 happened in the sixties. I got married in 1970, got pregnant immediately. We had differences, and I came back here to San Francisco to have my baby and after he was born in August went back to Los Angeles, because Pete [M. Mhunzi, neé Walter Preston Smith] and I were going to try to get back together again. That didn't work. So I came—and I was in a play. That's when I was in the Cinderella Brown play that Elizabeth rewrote during that summer. That didn't work out, because the company split up because they tried to put us in a big movie theater, and that just didn't work at all. And then the relationship with my husband didn't work, so I moved back to San Francisco. That was at the end of '71. That's when E.J. called me.

MASON:: But even during those periods—I mean, there was a period where you worked at the Watts Towers. I mean, you were at the Black Arts Council.

JACKSON:: Well, that was all that two years that I was with the gallery between—

MASON:: So you taught, worked at the gallery, and worked at Watts Towers?

JACKSON:: Yeah well, what happened was that after the first year, '69—the gallery opened in March '69, and probably by June of 169 it could be that that's when I decided that I didn't want to teach anymore. I only had to take six more hours of in-service training and I would have had a California teaching credential. And I decided again I didn't want to take a risk, because I still wouldn't be a painter if I continued. I just decided to take the risk and not teach anymore and deal with the art full-time. So I gave away all my teacher clothes and all my canned food, invited all the teachers to come and take the canned food off the shelf. Because I really was becoming more of a vegetarian then, as well. And I also felt a lot of the canned food that I had was like Hunts—it was stuff that when you're growing up—the things that your parents buy and you sort of buy and live the same way until you develop your own way of living. So I was boycotting Hunts and Dole and S and W and all, Del Monte.

MASON:: Because it just represented your parents?

JACKSON:: It represented the corporate system that was really an oppressor all over the world. And that's when I gave away all that food and had a different lifestyle and gave away all my teacher clothes, all those nice neat little dresses that you wear. And they thought that I was really crazy. They thought, "How could you give up a real job? How are you going to live?" And in 1968 was when I made up my mind that I would not have any jobs unless they were arts related. And I was able to do that up until I moved back here to San Francisco in the mid-eighties. And then I was doing all kinds of strange things.

MASON:: Because in the late sixties, that's when the community started to get money. The black community, Watts and Compton, they started to—John Outterbridge started the Communicative Arts Academy, and I guess there was like Mafundi Institute and Watts Writers Workshop.

JACKSON:: That's right. I forget about all of those. That's right, the Watts community got money. And, see, the thing is with Galley 32, I never had any grants or funds. There were a couple of people who tried to hide their money in my bank account; I didn't realize what the implications of that was all about. One women was getting a divorce, Joan [Miller] Kirkeby, so she put some money in my account. The Armenian guy that I was with [Donald Missirlian]—we had split up by then; that was part of my moving and having a gallery—he hid some money in my account and let me use it. And what happened was that I became audited as a result of this while they, who were very well-off, weren't audited. They hid their money in my account, and then I was the one who ended up being punished because this money was in my bank account. And I had no idea. I was very naive. I didn't know what that was about. Joan was a nervous wreck because she was going through a divorce and she'd just adopted a child. And they were—his family [Arnold C. Kirkeby's] was very well off—Kirkeby Center—but he was crazy. So it was okay her money being in there for a while. But the money from Donald Missirlian that was hidden in my account for a couple of months—you know, that in exchange paid the rent, so I ended up being punished for that. So that was a hardship that sort of set me back. [tape recorder off]

MASON:: How many—that's really curious—that's interesting that everybody remembers that.

JACKSON:: Yes. There was a point where—basically because I didn't have teacher income anymore, I think the first exhibition at the gallery that actually made money—some money, not a lot—was Dan Concholar's show [Dan Concholar], where he sold some paintings. That paid the rent. Dan made some money so he could buy more supplies. Then I think we were struggling for a little bit there. I don't think anybody else—Timothy Washington had a show [Timothy Washington], and I had fights with him and told him he'd better go out and make some small pieces of artwork, because we wouldn't even be able to pay the bills. Because he was asking $10,000—we were beginning that first recession in 1970. And I said, "Timothy, it's like you're asking $10,000 for your art? You know even people like [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Willem] de Kooning aren't making that kind of money." They probably were, but, "You're not de Kooning and Rauschenberg at this point. You are a black artist. And there's nobody out there with money. Money is tight, and you're not going to get $10,000, $14,000, $20,000 for art." So he went out and he made some little pieces of art, which were beautiful pieces. And I think that was the only time that I ever asked an artist to do that, because financially it was—we were in a nervous situation as far as how the gallery was going to stay open. And the little pieces did sell, because they were pieces that I guess he was selling for probably $60 to $100, $200, $400. People could sort of barely eke out $400.

MASON:: These were the etchings?

JACKSON:: Yeah, those etchings on metal, which were actually—they were beautiful pieces. They were so beautiful. And less self-conscious than the big pieces that were becoming these formal sculptures that were—they're dynamic. Timothy's work is incredible. But even Mrs. [Joan] Ankrum had trouble because he wanted to ask too much money for his works. The problem with younger artists selling something for a lot of money, which is luck the first time or in between, is that suddenly it goes to their heads, and they think it's going to happen again. But that one person who has got some money from someplace is a rarity that comes along—quite often—

MASON:: I guess I hear people who are like, "Hollywood and all these actors and—"

JACKSON:: And they were. It's like the black actors supported Galley 32 in many ways because—people like Marguerite Ray, people like Bernie [Bernard T.] Casey, who was also an artist. But many artists would come through. Betye Saar knew a lot of people in film and theater, and so did I. They would come through, and if they got a part—and the black actors were going through the same struggle where basically they were new in the industry. But Marguerite raised a very good example, where she would get a job, and she'd come and buy a little piece of art. Maybe she started out buying something for $25. Next time she got a better job, and then she would buy something maybe for $200. Then when she got the series on television, she would come though and buy art all the time. So a lot of people gradually started that way, by buying a little piece of art. And they were really proud to be able to buy a piece of art, a real piece of art by a black artist, as opposed to a print. So what happened later, when I realized that there wasn't a lot of money coming in—and I was getting kind of nervous, because postage had gone up from three cents or four cents, and it was now like six or seven cents. And when you're sending out two or three thousand pieces of mail and you've got to do printing—and what I was basically doing—and I didn't realize it was the same thing the Ankrums [Joan Ankrum and William Challee] were doing—I was putting the money up front. Because this was the way the Ankrums dealt with me. The gallery put the money up front and purchased everything—printing, mailing, reception—and then you split the difference with the artist after something was sold. Well, if you go through a number of shows and nothing sells—it's like Elizabeth [Leigh-Taylor] had people who were already collectors. They came in and they bought work of hers. I think right off before the show even opened we had a piece of work sold, so that helped to finance the exhibition. If artists were new or didn't have a following or if their prices were too high—usually they had reasonable prices. I think most people realized that it was better to make the work available for just the average person walking in the door than to be stupid and have prices that were just outrageously high. Because that wasn't what it was about. Oh, Ron Moore had a beautiful exhibition of his drawings, and it was all penises. And you didn't realize what these things were, these images, because they were so beautifully drafted. The draftsmanship was incredible. And I think he sold out everything in his show. But his prices were still—it's like none of the works were more than $200, and most that we would sell [were] $50, $75. So it paid for the show and he made a little money. He probably had $200 or $300 in his pocket. And I said, "Ron, what are you going to do? Are you going out and buy art supplies?" And he said, "Yeah, number-two pencils." So for Ron that's all he had to do was buy pencils and good paper, and then framing. But a friend of his came through, and she had been working as a go-go dancer in a club. She said she was making like $300 a week, which was a lot of money then.

MASON:: It's still a lot of money.

JACKSON:: Yeah, it is. It is a lot of money. Which is ironic when you consider—when I think of when I went to South America, I was making $850 a month. And all along now in my life when I have had job jobs, I still haven't made more than $850 a month. Even now as a theater artist, I get paid what looks like a fairly healthy salary. But I may get it at the beginning of the contract, and then the show is finished two months later or three months later. So it still evens out that I'm making the same money I was making when I was twenty-one or sixteen, my first job. And here we are, it's like thirty years later. So anyway at the time, she was working for—I think Valentines A-Go-Go was the agency. No, there were several agencies, and they were advertising in the paper. And I think she must have said that Valentines A-Go-Go was supposed to be a good agency. So I went in to see him, because I had been a dancer. I remember his name was Colin Irish III. It was a long name, very Irish. And he was an Aquarian, also. I think our birthdays may even have been the same day. So we became friends. And it turned out, when I went in there were a few go-go jobs. He sent me on one job, and when I showed up at the door and I was black, they said they didn't need a dancer. And I had spent money for cab fare to go out there and everything. I came back there and he apologized, and he said, well, he had this other opening at the Loser's Club. And what had happened was that they wanted to experiment, because I guess there was this legal case about nude dancers, and they were looking for a very sophisticated, very elegant—the first legal nude dancer in California. The Loser's Club was a club that was on La Cienega [Boulevard] down the street from Ankrum Gallery. And I became the first legal nude dancer there at the Loser's Club. And the interesting thing was last year I hear on the radio that it is no longer legal.

MASON:: Yeah, it has something to do with that you can't serve alcohol if you're in the nude or something like that.

JACKSON:: Yeah. So I thought it's very interesting how now it's come around—how many years is this, now? That was 1969. It's like a twenty-year cycle, twenty-five-year cycle. Then at the Loser's they would do a turnover after people got tired of looking at one person. And David [Hammons], with his crazy self, for his anniversary he brought his wife to the club to see me dance, which—you know, evidently she was ready to kill him. I don't blame her!

MASON:: She was jealous?

JACKSON:: Well, no. You'd take your wife for an anniversary present to go see somebody dance in the nude at the Loser's Club? But anyway, that was David. Probably another piece of art, probably David doing—people understand basically I was doing that because that was the only way to finance the gallery.

MASON:: Did you look at it as—? Were you interested in performance then?

JACKSON:: Well, I was a dancer.

MASON:: No, I mean performance art.

JACKSON:: No, there wasn't any such thing.

MASON:: That was later in the seventies.

JACKSON:: No, I had actually modeled for Charles White's art class at Otis [Art Institute] to make extra money. I think it was $9 an hour—it was either $9 or $3 an hour; I forget what it was. But I had modeled for his art class. I had modeled for some of the artists in Watts for their drawing sessions. And people had modeled for me, so it wasn't a matter of—you know, the body is a normal and natural, beautiful thing. So it was no big deal. There wasn't any sex involved. It was just dancing. Then later the same agent worked out a system where—basically he was an old vaudeville guy, and he taught a lot of us how to do real stripping. They wanted real dancers, women who would be like Las Vegas-style dancers in beautiful costumes. And he taught us how to strip. We had all these break-away costumes where only parts of the gown come off. You might have three or four bra tops and bottoms, so you were never ever completely nude. But we were making something like $400 to $500 a week. And that financed the gallery through until I got married, and then I got pregnant. And then I had one job. I think I realized I was pregnant because my stomach was getting to be a little round tummy. And I didn't want to go do it anymore, and I didn't dance anymore. But I think he expected that I was going to continue to dance, my husband, Pete Mhunzi, who was a musician at the time. And then I decided I was really tired of the gallery. Because John Outterbridge and I had talked about it. This was in the summer of '70. We had talked about it, and some of the ideas that we'd all thrown around were about what a gallery really is and what it represents. It's four walls, four white walls. And even "though a lot of people had come to the gallery, people from Watts, some of the boys, like gang boys, had come to the gallery, but it still was something—Alonzo [Davis]'s space was closer to the community. But was this an artificial kind of entity for showing art? We thought, wouldn't it be great to put art in the boxcar? Because the trains go through the communities. Just like the train goes here. BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] is on one side of me; the train's back here. It goes all through the community. So why not put an art exhibition in a boxcar, take it through the community, open up the doors, and let people go in and see the exhibition? When I was a little girl here in San Francisco, the Freedom Train came through.

MASON:: What was that?

JACKSON:: And I just saw photographs that we had—I had them in a scrapbook or somewhere—of the Freedom Train. The Freedom Train was a train that traveled across country, and I think it had exhibitions in it. I was a baby when that happened. That was in the forties. And that train represented the kind of freedom supposedly that we would hope for America. I have to look up the research on that, but supposedly it came—it was supposed to represent freedom for all people in this country, you know, and out of the segregation that was going on in the South. It was a way also of letting people know what was actually happening in different parts of the country and how some people didn't have their freedoms. Now, that was my understanding based upon what my parents told me, but now I have to go back and research. I found a photo in some things I have of that Freedom Train. It was like a big thing for everybody to go see that Freedom Train.

MASON:: Was it initiated by the government? Or was it a private thing?

JACKSON:: I think it was, and it may have been—let's see. This was before [Dwight D.] Eisenhower became president, so I don't know whether Roosevelt was still president then or what. But it was a train that came across the country with this exhibition in it about people in America. But the train that we talked about opening up in each community, having exhibitions that represented the people, was very important. So it made Gallery 32 as what it was no longer—for me, anyway—relevant. Considering the situation with the [Black] Panthers, with the SLA [Symbionese Liberation Army], so many of us being stopped by police. I had gone to jail for parking tickets, supposedly. They followed us from—there was a really wild artist who had come from Europe, a black artist. These people over on Sixth Street in Hancock Park had given him their attic. Their attic was about as big as this whole top floor of this building. And he was the type of artist who needed everybody around him to paint the night before his opening or the night of his opening, I forget what it was. So he had all of us—he wanted us to all come and watch him paint and watch him finish this final stuff before his exhibition. I remember he wore a cape.

MASON:: A beret?

JACKSON:: When you talk to David Hammons, David might remember the whole thing, and Concholar. Anyway, that was when I had the Buick hearse that I had bought from my income tax money that had come back, my refund, which they tried to take back from me, after I had spent it buying the car. We all left—it was after ten thirty, and we told him, "We've got to go because black people coming from Beverly Hills after ten thirty get stopped." We were teasing and joking about that. So it was probably eleven thirty to midnight when we left there. And we were driving down Sixth Street—I think that's the street that goes east and west on the way to the gallery—and this police car followed us all the way, all the way up to my front door. And there was Pete, my husband, and David Hammons and my dog John, a black Afghan, in the car. And because I had gotten parking tickets right there in front of the building—all the parking tickets that I had were from right there in front of the gallery. I'd have to run out and put money in the meter. Eventually I finally rented a parking space on the back side. They hauled me off to jail for parking tickets. And David ran around town trying to collect money. I think he got $6 from Ruth Waddy. I mean, that was a lot of money for people to come up with. They had to get $28 to get me out of jail. Well, by the time they came back, they still hadn't even booked me. They took eight hours just to book me.

MASON:: They didn't tell you why they had arrested you?

JACKSON:: They said because of parking tickets. And when David and, I think it was, Melanie, a friend of Pete's—David had run around and gotten the $28 from a lot of different people, a lot of different artists, to try to get me out* By the time he got there, they hadn't booked me. Then they said the fee had gone up to $88, which was bogus. Or $84 or something like that. And I was in the process of moving out of the gallery, and part of the stuff—I said to Pete, "Forget it. I'd rather rent the moving truck. I'll just sit here in jail for the weekend." Well, at the same time I think Angela [Y. Davis] was in jail then. So were the [Charles] Manson women. This is all at Sybil Brand [Institution for Women] jail. And I learned—I mean, there were some grandmothers in jail. There was one woman in jail because she and her husband had a television set in their car. They were stopping everybody in Los Angeles, no matter who you were. They just stopped people. There was one young girl who must have been fourteen [years old] who lied about her age, and they put her in that jail. And she was waiting for Johnny Tailor to get her out. She kept saying, "Johnny Tailor will get me out, Johnny Tailor get me out." So it was like the whole weekend, that was a very enlightening kind of experience to see who was in jail. The first night I was in there—Sybil Brand was supposed to be a place where there were two cots, and there was supposed to be one security gate. They had two security gates. This woman had put up her money for this jail supposedly to have a humane condition. Well, the first night I was there I slept on the floor. And this pregnant woman, who evidently had been a Panther, tried to steal the change from under my pillow. I kept feeling something funny, and all of a sudden I felt this hand. She was trying to steal the thirty-five cents I had under my pillow. So it was really interesting to find out what had happened. I didn't tell my parents about that for a long time. I think I was much older when they found out that had happened. If they had known they probably would have been very upset, I'm sure. But that was just the way things were in Los Angeles. I mean, David was stopped every time he went out on the street. Because he would have a half a beard, or he'd have a beard, or he'd have his hair in braids, or he'd be hitchhiking in Pomona. You know, we were waiting for David, and he had been picked up on his way from doing a lecture at Pomona [College] with Samella [Lewis], the same series I was in a lecture with. He had a check in his pocket, but he had no money. So that's kind of the way that it was. That was the atmosphere. So this time around, when everybody's burning the city, it's like it's been that way for a long time. The element of the police stopping—I was told at one point that there was a file on me this thick with the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency].

MASON:: Well, you could get your file, though. Did you want to?

JACKSON:: Yeah, I know that now. I haven't done that yet. It would be interesting to get it. But at the time—it's like all of us, I'm sure they have files on us, because they decide that just because we're artists that we're subversive. Your existence as an artist is subversive because basically—and it's interesting, now that I realize and I'm sitting here talking about it, during the eighties the artists were about money as opposed to being political and social entities, human beings. It's very hard for an artist, from the way that I grew up and knowing, not to make a comment about the society that you're living in.

MASON:: What about performance artists like Karen Finley and people doing work about feminist consciousness or gay rights?

JACKSON:: I think that probably in the past few years I have been less exposed to performance artists, so I'm not familiar with them. And I may have a prejudice because I work in theater. Performance art is—you know what it is also—when I had the studio at Jefferson [Boulevard] and Main [Street], that's where some early performance artists started. There was a guy name John White who would call me on the phone and say hi. And then he'd rattle off something else and he'd say, "I'm doing this thing, and—." Or he'd call up and he'd say anything on the phone, and that was part of his performance art. Then there were a couple of guys, [Mystic Knights of the] Oingo Boingo, who started doing some things. They were sort of crazy, outrageous people who also started a band that did performance artist parties. Now Oingo Boingo evidently is a [rock] group.

MASON:: Oh, it's the same people.

JACKSON:: Yeah, it's the same two guys. It would be the same as—what are those two brothers? The Blues Brothers.

MASON:: Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi.

JACKSON:: Yeah, those two. It's like the way those two guys started. You know, they may have been regular comedians, but that's what Oingo Boingo was like, those two guys, sort of—some white boys who cut off their hair and did some funny things. And then there was Eleanor Antin, who I know did some things. So for me there was this strange crossover where I think there may have been a slight prejudice upon my part, but—which is probably—I don't know if it is a conservative opinion or not about being a visual artist or being a performer and maybe because I worked in theater and because I had been a visual artist. Now, someone who I feel takes performance art to more truth, because it's really integrated very well, and maybe it's because I know him, is David Hammons. Where, for example, I didn't get to go to the exhibitions—I didn't find out about it until it was over with.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1992

MASON:: Okay, you were talking about David Hammons at P.S. 1 [Contemporary Art Center].

JACKSON:: Yeah. It's like what has happened to me and David is—and I always thought of David as a sculptor. I still think of David as a sculptor. But he also sculpts time and space by his existence. It's like David just showing up one day, you know. He may show up from Italy in Timbuktu. To me it's performance art in a sense, where it is not called performance art, it is not something David concentrates on, it is not a gimmick. It just happens. With David things happen because they come out of ideas. They come out of thought processes or things that happen to him. To me he is a true performance artist in the sense that—you know, there was the basketball game that happened in the exhibition because it was a part of the exhibition; people danced, and there was the band there and all that. And what happens out of that happens as a spontaneous reaction to what is going on at the time. To me that is performance art as opposed to something that's set up and sort of a "gimickal"—that's a new word, gimickal!—a gimmicky kind of planned thing that is almost theater but is not really theater. It's visual art, but it's not visual art; it's something else. And maybe also because originally some of the performance artists were—oh, what was that guy's name? I think it was Joseph Beuys. It was another guy who was mutilating his body.

MASON:: Yeah, I know who you're talking about. I can't remember what his name was.

JACKSON:: Yeah, he was one of the early ones. So, you know, it's like some of that stuff has just sort of turned me off originally to performance art, I think, where basically it was kind of like white boy tricks. So now it's like I haven't paid attention in between. But I haven't paid attention to a lot that's going on in visual arts in between, just because a lot of what I've seen has been garbage. When I was in New York it's like a lot of people were just imitating, imitating. And there's one artist that I know, Mike Bidlo, who I met when the guy who was my assistant on the CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] program, Tom Corn, took me around New York. There must have been fifty exhibitions in one night. We went to almost every exhibition. You'd go from door to door of exhibitions. I was seeing a lot of—it's terrible to call somebody else's work trash, but it was really trash, because basically it was just stuff that was slapped, dashed, thrown out there to make some kind of imitative statement without really even understanding process or what the materials would do. People wanting a lot of money when a piece of artwork is going to fall apart—

MASON:: You don't like more conceptual art or things that—

JACKSON:: I think, for example, it's like David [Hammons] does work, and Betye [Saar], I know, that, okay, you understand. This is put up for this exhibition, and then it may not exist anymore. To me that's more honest, because that work is not there to be sold. That work is there because it makes a statement, and it will come down, and it may never exist again. If it's reproduced it may not be reproduced the same way. So I have no objection to that. But as soon as you put a dollar sign on it, then it becomes something else. And I think a lot of what happened in the eighties was about dollar signs as opposed to the concept and the process.

MASON:: Oh, you were saying people were making products they didn't understand were going to fall apart. They just didn't understand the materials.

JACKSON:: Yeah, they didn't understand the materials. They didn't understand what those materials were going to do. It's like the guy who does the—I don't know why I blank on names. But the guy who does the art with all the dishes.

MASON:: [Julian] Schnabel.

JACKSON:: Schnabel. His plates have been falling off the canvas. I mean, anybody who knows if you put—like when Nathaniel Bustion was putting concrete on the canvas, it's going to fall off after a point. And somebody pays $10,000 or $20,000—so now what Schnabel does is he's got this guy who goes around who makes his living by repairing Schnabel's paintings by charging a collector $10,000 to glue the plates back on with Bondo or Barge, which is glue that the guy could go out and buy for four or five dollars and do it himself and glue the dishes back on the painting himself.

MASON:: Talk about performance. [laughs]

JACKSON:: Yeah. So basically you've got a con game going, and you've got this thing that is making art cheap. And it's also putting a mentality into young people's heads that it's about money and dollars and selling yourself. It's not about the ideas or the true concepts behind what the art is. I think part of the reality of my generation of artist is that we decided that it was our life. And of course, if we could sell a painting, great, because then you go out and buy more supplies and maybe sometimes you pay some rent. You know, that has happened. That doesn't always happen. But what we did we did because we really believed in the work that we were doing and not because the dollars were behind it to motivate it. And now that seems to be the trend. And it's really scary when a younger artist has potential and talent but they go into just sort of churning them out. And I think that's the thing that I was fighting all along in my own work is that I didn't want to just turn the work out. And I was terribly prolific. Like even since I've been here, just in the past month I've started a number of works. But just because I put some mark on the paper doesn't mean that that thing is a quality work or is something that I want to represent me. I was embarrassed when I went into a couple of houses and I recognized it as my work but I didn't remember doing it. And I didn't think that what it was was all that wonderful. But because it was an early work, it was work that—and it supported me, and it was a piece that because that person really loved it—and they still felt good about it—then you know it was fine. It was an early work. I think that the thing that has been really disturbing to me, and the reason I don't want to exhibit anymore for a while until I have a retrospective or when I'm fifty, is that there are some collectors who actually own some works that I feel very strongly about as being works that represent major changes in my life and work, pieces that I feel are the quality of what they are, and what the process was was very important. But those people are never asked to show those works at any exhibitions. Nobody ever goes to those people, because they're too lazy. They go to the same people every time. Poor Olga Adderly. I don't even know whether she's even had that painting on her wall very much from the time that she's owned it, because they keep going back to Olga to ask her for the same painting. And she's really sweet about saying that she loves being able to share the painting with other people. But I have other work that I've done.

MASON:: What's the name of that piece that she has?

JACKSON:: It's the painting—I think it's called Not Everything We See is Real. It's the kind of double image with the leaves going up.

MASON:: Okay. I think I have that.

JACKSON:: It's in almost every book that anybody ever publishes. And I think that every time Samella publishes a book it's in that book.

MASON:: Yeah, that's where I saw it.

JACKSON:: It was in that last 1960s exhibition. I gave them a list of collectors with works from every period, and they chose that. They went to my friend Sharon [Rogers]—who is always giving me space, and she's helped me financially and everything—and they borrowed a painting from her, an early work. They borrowed a painting from Mrs. Ankrum. But they did not even bother to go look at any of the other paintings from other collectors. And if they had they would have found stronger works than those three.

MASON:: I guess these art historians are always looking for a kind of documentation. So if there is something in a book, I guess that makes it legitimate, so they want it for the exhibition. Do you think that's the problem?

JACKSON:: But to me when you do real research, because something is in a book that is just the impetus to go find out what else is in that period, what other things were done at that time. And if it's already published, somebody else has already put their hands on it and made a choice about that. So now the thing is to go find what else is in that period. And does it represent the artist better or in another way? Or if the artist specifically says, "I've done this other work that I feel is important for these changes that I've been going through," then at least take a look at it, make a note of it. You may not agree with the artist, but that is important, because that is a change that that artist was going through.

MASON:: Yeah. Supposedly historians are supposed to go around and visit artists' studios and talk.

JACKSON:: But they use the same works over and over and over again. I mean, it makes it look as if—

MASON:: Why don't you like that one, for example, Not Everything We See is Real?

JACKSON:: I do like it, but—

MASON:: I mean not dislike it but—

JACKSON:: It's overused and overexposed, and it's not the only work that represents me from that period. The work that they chose from Sharon for that show was an early work, but there were other works that I'd done in that period that were stronger works.

MASON:: Okay.

JACKSON:: That work that she owns is important for the period in the gallery, but there were other works. The works that I sent them that represented me in the eighties they didn't even show. Or they put a small one in. And this is what I'm saying, it's very important for our black historians to take the next step and go to another dimension. And maybe because I'm a hundred-percent person, a two-hundred-percent person, when I work and I do what I have to do, I do it, and I put my whole self into it. Which has probably been a mistake in my life. Because I put two hundred percent into what I do and I want to find out everything I possibly can. If I do research, even now in theater, I want to know everything I possibly can find. Leonard Jeffries is asking us to do research. They're crucifying this man because he's asking young people to do research. Go into your history, find out who you are. You may find out that maybe there's a book by a white person over here that tells you something that you don't want to hear, but it's there. Go find it out. That's why I just really am very upset these days about what's happening with—you know, it's like because we're being trained in traditional institutions—and part of the questions you're asking me are how the institutions influenced at that time—it's because that's what's happening now. It's becoming this influence and how a narrow path is being set and people follow a pattern of how they have to do something because that's acceptable. I just wrote a quote and put it on the wall about how real change comes when you don't necessarily choose amongst the alternatives that you're given. My big argument is that we have only two parties, and you either have to choose a Republican or you choose a Democrat, even if their pathway is really the same, it's just in disguise. I see that now. [William J.] Clinton and [George H. W.] Bush are the same thing that we're down the line for. We don't have a third choice or a fourth choice. So I get really annoyed when I have to take the choices that are given to me and not something that really comes from my soul or who I'm about. And this is what I am saying: black people have to start making their own criteria as opposed to accepting. You may learn in the system—that is, that university system—but somehow—and it's that thing where we get propagandized, and the whole propagandization becomes a part of us as opposed to us making our own. Every time I meet a young art historian I want to say, "Find another way." I was telling Cecil [Fergerson] this morning, people need to start interviewing our children. I think that is what we were talking about yesterday. Was I saying that?

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: Our children have a perspective. And it may not seem like very much, but they grew up with us and put up with us, and it's another point of view. I guess that's what I'm asking for. I'm asking for some other points of view about who we are. And even if I personally don't agree with how somebody saw me at that time or how they perceive me now, they perceive me from their point of view. So I'm saying there is some validity in that point of view. Maybe that contradicts what I just said about people choosing certain kinds of artworks of mine. But I think that that represents a laziness. Where if I give twenty resources and you only go to the first three on the list and you don't bother to go beyond that, then I find that to be sort of negligent. And I know time is short and people don't have much time. It just happened to me in this last show that I designed, where I told the guy I would have some drawings to him by the second. By the second I really was not ready yet; I hadn't worked it all out. So I couldn't send him something or anything. Part of the process of working toward becoming an artist is that you can't put time limitations—and of course, in this society that we have, there is always this time limitation. But when a museum starts two or three years ahead planning an exhibition that is supposed to be about the research and about finding out who these people are that are going to be in the exhibition and taking that time to thoroughly research and get the information so that what's there is really a definitive view about these human beings—and of course, we have all these limitations that are set by institutions, and I think that stifles what we are all about. It stifles our history.

MASON:: What's interesting, though, is that most black art historians are themselves artists. Do you think that that has any kind of effect on the history that is being written about black artists?

JACKSON:: Yeah, I'm afraid so. I have to be very candid about that, because I think that in one sense it's good, because then as an artist you have your hands in what that medium is, and you know what it is and what it does. There is a certain point—for example, I know that for me art history is fascinating. It's something where I thought if I came back in another life I would either become a forest ranger or an art historian, now even a dramaturg. I might even want to become that because of the research and the history that's involved. And it's possible to try to become both. But you either become mired in the research or you become mired in the paint. There are periods in life when sometimes you can only do one thing. You can try to do them all, and it can get confusing. When I was younger I used to do six things at once. I don't know how good they all turned out. But I think it's like if you decide to do art history and research, then you put your head fully into that. And then you paint, but you don't show. And you paint inch by inch. And you also separate your own painting from the fact that other people are out there showing or painting full-time, or sculpting, or whatever they are doing. You must detach ego from that painting. Because when ego enters into it and you are resentful of those people that you are researching and that you're interviewing or that you're curating an exhibition for and you shortchange those people that you're putting on an exhibition for, you shortchange yourself. Because the full response is not given there. I guess I'm asking a hundred percent. And you have to do it all. Maybe that's my response just because of the way I've noticed a number of artists have been dealt with when the time comes to edit, or the research that's been done is not thorough. I don't think we do thorough research as black people. We haven't, otherwise we'd know more about ourselves than we do and understand the psychology of who we are, which we don't delve into. And the relationships. There have been so many people who've stolen from us in the process, from Picasso to Erik Satie to Jackson Pollack. You know, under all those dribbly-drips of Jackson Pollack are—he started out painting Maori, and you see all the sort of quote, unquote, "primitive" art forms or indigenous people's art forms under the dribbles and the drips. So how many artists are aware of—? Let alone not knowing who Charles White is or the fact that somebody like Jackson Pollack has actually used our art as a basis for his own. Picasso, you know, all these people who use our art as a basis for their own work. Even Gauguin going off—I just read something that said Gauguin was the only artist who ever totally threw himself into a culture and became that thing and painted about it. Well!

MASON:: Who's to say? [laughs]

JACKSON:: You live with people and you make babies, and you have a lot of redheaded little brown people, and he paints about them and gives them disease, so you say he's thrown himself into it and immersed into it, therefore he's a part of that culture. He's not. He was a European who went off and did the same thing that Christopher Columbus and everybody else did: you go off and you reap a benefit from somebody else's culture.

MASON:: Do you think that will change? It seems like we're finally developing a tradition. Just talk about art history. You know, you have people like Samella Lewis, who studied with Elizabeth Catlett and who studied Chinese [art], and there are people who have studied under her. And then there are people at Yale [University] now who have studied with Robert Farris Thompson. You look skeptical. But do you know Richard Powell? He's a printmaker and he's also an art historian. And he's developing some ideas based—do you know Houston Baker, who's a younger black critic and writer?

JACKSON:: These are all real young people.

MASON:: Yeah. They're developing theories about relationships, black culture, a black musical culture, kind of building on Amiri Baraka's theories and things like that. So—

JACKSON:: I would love to read all their work and see what their talking about, because basically I have a great deal of respect for Samella. I thought it was incredible that—one of the things that had happened when I was married to the Nigerian—and I really started learning about Yoruba culture—was to see the relationship, the silhouette of Yoruba culture that was the same silhouette that was in Asian culture. Of the little hat on top and the robe, the gown, that triangular shape that's there, and the decoration and design. I have Asian people who will look at me and take a second look because there is something they see maybe in what I'm wearing or a look that looks like them. But then, they're actually going back to Africa. So I was always very impressed with the fact that here Samella speaks fluent Mandarin, from what I understood, and studied Asian culture and African and Afro-American culture. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly read Samella's books, but I'm always waiting to see that relationship there. It's like recently I heard someone talking—I guess it was a documentary on television—about the Aztec culture coming from Asia, and my feeling was always that it was African. But then in a sense it was right. And I was just given a book called Sun of Heaven: [Imperial Arts of China by Robert L. Thorpe], about those pieces that were just dug up, and there were some absolutely Aztec-looking pieces in there. But it just shows the sort of interrelationships of these cultures that originated in Africa. There are a number of people who are trying to prove that Asia was before Africa. So I'm waiting to see what the younger historians are really going to do.

MASON:: There's a guy at Howard University, whose name slips my mind, but his specialty is the study of the African diaspora. And actually the man I came to study with at UCLA, Arnold [G.] Rubin, was doing work on the presence of Africa in Japan in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. So there's a basis for building a lot of things.

JACKSON:: Well, definitely. Especially now that people are really—and because I think what's happening, I think especially in the past thirty years, where there are so many people of mixed backgrounds now—and white people that are finding out that their ancestors are black people. Or white people who have finally decided that they want to know who their white ancestors are, because they know less about themselves than we do when it comes down to it, when they start asking who they are. And I think now that people are sort of wanting to delve into what all the cultures are that are mixed into their backgrounds, it gives an interest. But racism is so intense now—we're almost back into Nazi Germany. I mean, it is. Actually it has never stopped here. I mean, we've just been the counterpart, like the sister country over here. I mean, we have really been living under a great deal of fascism and the same kind of—so we're going to have two splits. We're going to have a split where there's always either going to have to be that heightened knowledge that comes to the fore, and then there is going to be the other half that's going to become that Aryan racism that is going to say, "No, that isn't true, and it can't be." And let's hope that people survive this plague in order to get that history out and survive all the other social ills that are there. I mean, it seems like when people are just at the point of getting information out, then somehow they're stymied. I mean, this whole indictment of Leonard Jeffries. I thought that he had documented in writing what he was talking about, and someone said he hadn't, which I find quite skeptical, that as a historian he would not write it down.

MASON:: Yeah, as a scholar.

JACKSON:: And I don't believe that's true.

MASON:: Maybe they have probably the footnotes. I don't know.

JACKSON:: I don't know. But it's like every time someone does try to come out with what that history is, then there's always a foot to squelch that information, or there is a bribe or a gimmick given where the person goes for the money and then their direction gets changed. So as a younger person—we always start off as younger people taking risks and having marvelous ideas about what we want to do, but there is always somebody or something that comes through that changes the course. So you have to be really strong and not go for recognition. Just study, study, study and work, work, work. But then, once it's done, where does it get published? Or where are these papers archived? For a number of us as black artists who have a lot of papers and works, where will the things be put?

MASON:: The California Afro-American Museum?

JACKSON:: Not!

MASON:: Okay. This is a good place to end.

JACKSON:: Excuse me.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE AUGUST 14, 1992

MASON:: Today we're going to go through some slides of Suzanne Jackson's work that will show a progression of her work from I guess art school to what time period, approximately?

JACKSON:: It looks like the 1970s, the 1980s.

MASON:: Through the 1980s. Okay.

JACKSON:: This was a still life that was a problem-solving painting in oil. I think it may have been a final project. It was in Wesley Chamberlain's painting class. I believe this was my first painting class, real painting class. And the progression used to go that usually the instructor would start with a group of paintings, or with each individual painting, and then sometimes the last person's would be the painting, I guess, that really solved the problem. I was really sort of shocked, because this was not an easy painting to do. It's hard. What they used to do is pile up a bunch of junk in the middle of the studio, and then we had to sort of selectively or from a point of view choose parts of a still life and build the composition within the painting. So the elements within this painting were all the things and stuff that were piled into the studio. And as it turned out, it turned out to be the painting that evidently solved the problem best in class for that—

MASON:: Were you the only one to include a lot of elements from the studio itself? Because you have shapes in the background and some shadows and things from the walls.

JACKSON:: No, everybody actually had elements from what was there. There was so much stuff that was piled in, from back and behind and things that hung down, but it was just points of view and choosing the elements and how the light and dark and the shapes worked within the composition. And somehow with the chair facing one direction and the typewriter and the table in the other and the old radio back there and the lights and the darks, I guess it solved the problem. And the light and shadow under and around, which kind of amazed me. And I guess it amazed the instructor, because—actually, he ended up being one of my favorite painting instructors, although he was really a difficult instructor. Most of the time we couldn't figure out what he was talking about, or if we thought we could figure out what he was talking about we were all wrong. So this was kind of incredible that it worked. So that was kind of a good feeling at the end. It at least assured that I could paint and go on to the next semester, the next painting class.

MASON:: This is slide number two.

JACKSON:: This was probably my last painting project by my fourth year. As you can see, it's gone a long way from that first still life with the chair and the setup in the studio. And I think I was interested—it was the period during the Beatles and David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton. And it was also the beginning of me working wet-on-wet on canvas, sort of using—this went back to when I was thirteen, I guess. I did some posters for the International Foundation for a Humane Society and Kindness to Animals. It was a world poster contest where students from all over the world made posters within that theme and they sent them out. And my poster—and every year I entered it from about eighth grade on through my senior year. And as a result, I won—the first year I think I won a watercolor book from Watson-Guptill, Watercolor Painting Step by Step. And then I won scholarships in my last year, $500 scholarships from Standard Oil. I think I had a choice of scholarships to Banff [Canada] for the summer, Standard Oil scholarship, and a Home Drawing Scholarship. So this was kind of going back to that sort of wet-on-wet and watercolor feeling on canvas, but this was with the acrylic paint and ink. And I think I glazed—later on I went back and I glazed this over, because I knew the color that was ink wasn't going to hold. That was just part of the process of learning later on. But these were the paintings where they were trying to figure out what this was. It was a new way of painting, a new look that nobody had really done before. It was not cartoon, but was it painting? What was this that I was doing?

MASON:: And this was the same one that you had entered in the Watts [Summer] Festival [of Art]?

JACKSON:: Yeah, these were the ones I entered in the Watts Festival, really not knowing—I don't know. That was really bizarre that I did that. Now, somehow I'm skipping a piece here. Well, I lost a painting in there. There was the one of the Big Boy that was in that series also, so I must have put it in a different place. This was done later on when I moved into the space at Gallery 32.

MASON:: This is slide number three.

JACKSON:: These were small pieces that were done on—this one was probably done on canvas. But it was sort of the beginning of the period of paintings I think that familiarized people in Los Angeles with my work—little bird and leaves and things in there—

MASON:: What did that mean for you then? And how did that evolve, would you say?

JACKSON:: I think that I was just working subconsciously then. Probably some of the earlier posters that I did when I was twelve and thirteen had birds in them, which probably represented peace, and leaves and things, because that's the environment I grew up in. And I don't even remember the title of this painting. Let's see if there's a title on this slide. Oh, it says "collection of Marilyn Winters, Beverly Hills, California," and it's called Liberator I. It was done in 1969. So that must have been in my first exhibition that was at Ankrum Gallery in 1972 [Suzanne Jackson]. And I think probably part of the drawing in the face is influenced by having taken Charles White's drawing class, because it was kind of a way that he taught us to draw eyes and mouths and noses. And I think it's because, as he told us, whenever he drew people it didn't matter what color he was drawing them, they still turned out to look like black people, because that's just the way he drew. So this is kind of a beginning of that influence, even though this sort of looks like an international person, I think.

MASON:: This is slide number four.

JACKSON:: Now, this piece is the piece that's owned by Sharon Rogers now, and I think this is called—let me see here. I should look at these before I put them in. This is called Why Should I Have to Choose. And I believe this is a piece that was also shown at the exhibition on the 1960s [19Sixties: A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated. 1965-1975, at the California Afro-American Museum]. I think I worked on this over a period of time, probably from about '68, '69, '70, maybe. And it was the beginning of using hands and heads. And I just recently discovered that in African women, when they use the symbol of the hand it's a symbol that kind of signifies a clean hand on a righteous person; at the time I had no idea that's what it was. But to me those hands I think, especially because some of them were different hues, probably represented different kinds of people. It's really hard now to go back and reinterpret what it was that I was doing then. Because later on in the seventies, right after my son [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi] was born, I spent a period of about three weeks where I didn't see any people. I worked in a studio in my parents' basement, and it was more of a kind of a mystical experience. So many of these things were just happening, they were just coming. And it was just experiments that I was working with, just working with the paint and learning what the paint could do.

MASON:: So back then you wouldn't have made a connection to, say, an African influence on your art?

JACKSON:: Only slightly. I don't think I knew that much about African art. I didn't know as much as I learned later and then talking with people or reading. I knew African art, but I wasn't really making necessarily the relationship to who I was. And I think that without understanding it later and now looking at my work, I'm going back and realizing that probably growing up in Alaska, with Inuit art around and Athapascan art, Tlingit art, and then also having some little things passed on to me as a baby from my grandparents—I had an old Indian pouch. It was made out of deerskin with little beadwork on it. And I had a little chicken that was carved out of wood and a papoose that my grandmother gave me and some beads. I think a lot of those things probably subconsciously influenced imagery in my work originally. So now I'm realizing that probably when I go back now and I look at Eskimo work from the time that I lived there, it's quite different now what you see. I think I see a lot of things that are more touristy looking or more influenced by art from the lower United States. When I was living in Alaska it hadn't become a state yet. So the Eskimos and Indians still—whatever they wore, the moccasins and mukluks and their clothes that had beading or that had handiwork, that was simply because that was functional. It was decorative, but it was functional. It was a part of everyday life. So that was what I grew up with. And now I see those things in very old books as a part of history and extinct almost as an art form. So I think probably without realizing I have some influences from that, from growing up, and from the nature around me there, I'm sure. I know that. This is a piece that's in the Palms Springs [Desert] Museum, and it's called American Sampler. It was chosen by Joseph Hirshhorn for the Joseph Hirshhorn wing. There were a number of us who were artists at Ankrum Gallery in the early 1970s, including his daughter Naomi Carol and Bernie [Bernard T.] Casey, and I think with Samella Lewis, there was a group of us, and we all went down to a big banquet in order to inaugurate this new wing of the Palm Springs Museum. And I think this was the time that Mr. Hirshhorn was also trying to get the city of Los Angeles to build the big museum, and they weren't interested. So Washington, D.C., of course, got the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which he eventually had no control over. He simply donated the money to build the museum, and all the works that he chose or donated to the museum, or many of them, were not even used. They were put in the basement, including the big piece of mine called Animal. So it's interesting to see what happens to the benefactor—whatever his collection is doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go into the museum. The black artists that they chose are almost all men, and I think maybe Alma Thomas; they may have one or two paintings of hers. Well, this is during the seventies, this is 1972, and it's called My Ra Ritual. This is after I moved back to San Francisco for that period just after we had the Black Untitled II/[Dimensions of the Figure] exhibition at the Oakland Museum. This piece may have even been in that exhibition. I'm not sure. There was a whole series of paintings that I did. Actually, 1972 was the year that I had my first solo exhibition at the University of the Pacific in Stockton [California]. Larry Walker, who was an artist and was professor of the department there—he later became the head of the department—he invited me to show there at the university in Stockton. And then I had an exhibition in San Jose [California]. I think it was the San Jose Art League. It was a small exhibition. And then I had my first solo exhibition at the Ankrum Gallery that year. That was also the year that I wrote the first book [What I Love]. So it was as if having the baby in 1971, all of a sudden my energy level just went crazy, I guess. Because this whole new series of work, which really was the beginning of the sort of look of my painting and the imagery that everybody has sort of become familiar with, with the really strong white background and the sort of washy layers and layers of paint—that basically is kind of an old masters technique of layering the color for translucency. It's like the layers and layers of color build a depth in the painting. And some of the paintings, as thin as the color looks, there could be a hundred and fifty layers of color on each of my paintings. So these paintings in this little series were basically sort of influenced by a combination of probably spiritual things, Muslim and Buddhist and African. And I spent some time, about a three-week period of working on some things and finishing some paintings, where there was no past, no present, no future. It was like the time just went by, and all this work came out that was very spiritually influenced, like dreamed paintings. It was a very strange time.

MASON:: Would you say the layering of colors represents the history of the painting itself? That the layering has to do with a kind of memory and history and—?

JACKSON:: Well, no, it's just the technique of painting that's been done in a lot of the old masters' paintings. In working in oil paint, in order to get a luminosity and a depth, where it looks as if you're seeing through the painting—it's like layers and layers of color. It's called glazing, where you put down a layer of color, and maybe it's a wash of color, and then you either let it dry, or while it's wet you put on another layer. You keep layering and layering the color, and you get all these variations of textures and light that are under and over. I think Betye Saar may own this painting. We made a trade. This is called One of Us is Right. And actually this goes back. This was done in 1970. I don't know why these aren't in order; they should have been in original order. So this is earlier than the one we saw before. This was done at Gallery 32 still. I had a studio space upstairs at Gallery 32. The only time I ever showed at Gallery 32 was when we had The Sapphire Show. It was in 1968. When I first opened the gallery, Claude Booker—I think it was for Dan Concholar's exhibition [Dan Concholar]. Claude Booker brought Bernie Casey by. And I was skeptical about meeting him. They said he was a painter, and I thought, "Oh, boy, another athlete being a painter." He came by and saw the show, and then he bought a Dan Concholar. And then a women named Noreen [Sulmeyer] Stone, who became like a big sister friend, was writing an article about—I don't know if it was about black artists in general or she was just writing an article about me for some strange reason and the gallery. She happened to go by Ankrum Gallery trying to get information about—yes, she went by Ankrum Gallery to get information about other artists, black artists. And Bernie had invited me to come to Ankrum because he wanted Mrs. Ankrum to see my work. So he actually took me by to see Mrs. Ankrum, and there was Noreen Stone. So it was kind of a coincidence that she was writing this article. She'd been to my gallery. And Mrs. Ankrum liked my paintings, so that was how I began to work with Ankrum Gallery.

MASON:: Is Bernie Casey the reason that they became interested in showing the local black artists? Do you know?

JACKSON:: You mean at Ankrum?

MASON:: Yeah. I wonder how the Ankrums became—

JACKSON:: No, they had been showing. They represented Samella Lewis already. They had been showing her work, they had been showing Bernie's. They had had some of the first group shows of black artists way back long before all the big furor over black art. They had been showing artists. The Ankrums were very progressive people, politically progressive, although it was subtle. Bill [William] Challee, her partner, he was actually at the Armory Show when the Armory Show [International Exhibition of Modern Art] came in. He'd seen Georgia O'Keeffe's work when it was shown at [Alfred] Stieglitz's gallery. He'd been around a long time. He was married to a ballerina originally from, I forget, one of the really big ballet companies. He and Joan Ankrum had known each other for years. And Joan was married to an actor named Morris Ankrum, and I guess finally that ended either when he died of alcoholism—Joan and Bill were always in opposite places, and they finally got together. And basically Bill Challee was her sort of life partner. He raised her sons, who were both adopted. He was also kind of an aesthetic voice and vision in the gallery, the two of them together. And she was very good at business, but not in a harsh way. Neither of them were hard-sell business people. They would talk people through and tell them about the art. They really loved the art, and they loved the artists. They treated us like human beings instead of like a commodity. And if they felt that we weren't ready to have a show or that the quality of the work—or we needed more time to work, then they gave us that time. It wasn't that push, push, you've got to have a show. They just didn't believe in us just churning work out like crazy just to sell. They were wonderful. I think that part of my sort of not really showing a lot now is because of the things that went on with Ankrum. This was a hard period for all of us. The demise of Ankrum and just all of us living life and having life things happen to us has made the change. I had not been satisfied with any other galleries and dealers that I have had to deal with. I liked the gallery in East Hampton, the Bologna/Landi Gallery, very much. They were a very warm, wonderful Italian family who had a gallery. I had one show there with two Japanese artists. But it's just too expensive to ship art back and forth across the country. So to have a dealer like the Ankrums who actually supported artists—and then it became too expensive for them to do that, to finance the artist up front. This is called It Blooms in the Morning. This was 1973. And these were actually—the size of this painting—most of these paintings were a fairly good size. I don't have a size on this, but the size of this was probably about four feet by six feet, maybe, so it's much bigger than it seems there. And those I think are magpies, maybe.

MASON:: Do different birds mean different things in your paintings? Sometimes they look like doves or sometimes even a turkey or something.

JACKSON:: Well, I belonged to the Audubon Society as a child in Alaska. I was really interested in birds. I've always been interested in birds. That's why this morning I'm trying to decide what it's all about that that bird flew in the skylight, and was in here inside, and he was so friendly, what that means. Some people get very frightened when a bird comes into their house; it's not a good omen. But I think it was a good omen for some reason, since he was such a gentle little bird. He wasn't afraid of me. I think I used to have all kinds of reasons I thought or symbols for these birds being there. But I think it's just because I love the bird, and I love the plants—that plant was actually a plant that bloomed in my house that grew in the studio. And did I say it's called It Blooms in the Morning? Oh, that plant had this beautiful, velvety, sort of purple leaf to it. And it would close up. And then the leaves would open up, and the flowers would bloom in the morning. It was like a vine that would hang from the ceiling. It was really beautiful. I used a lot of the plants and things that I lived with—

MASON:: You were saying that these were the kinds of works that sold really well, but you said you thought they sold because you thought people were misinterpreting, missing something that was in your work.

JACKSON:: No, what actually happened—I think later on I felt like people were misinterpreting. My personal feeling about my work was that I could do the painting—and when I do it even now, my feeling is that I may do the paintings—and the reason is in the process of painting you have a whole lot of thoughts come through your mind about what you're doing. Sometimes time lapses and you work on something else, or you may have several thoughts in the process of working on something, but years later you don't remember what it was. My personal feeling is that the process is really important for me. When I'm finished and the painting is being exhibited or somebody else buys it, then that's their business. Each person comes to a painting and interprets for themselves. I can maybe say what it was I was thinking at the time, but if someone else sees something in the painting that gives them certain kinds of feelings, then that's their own. It's not mine anymore when I've finished it. This is a painting called Grandparents. This was actually done as a result—there is an old photograph that my mother [Ann-Marie Butler Jackson] had of my father [Roy Dedrick Jackson]'s mother [Minnie Harvey Jackson] and his stepfather, his adopted father [Truman Jackson], and I thought I had lost the photograph. So in order to try to reproduce from memory that photograph, I did this painting, which doesn't really look exactly like the photograph, but this is what it came from. That plant in the foreground is I think mustard.

MASON:: Is this the first painting you did as an actual portrait of someone?

JACKSON:: I hadn't even thought about that. Well, I have some drawings that are at my mother's house now, I did a portrait on brown paper of my mother, and I had a small one that I may have done later of my father. My mother has both of those on canvas. And I have another piece that's done on paper earlier, even earlier than these, before I left San Francisco, that looks very much like my friend Wilma Alexander Demmon's mother or aunt, but I don't know. Maybe consciously this was the first one, and it could be the only one that I've done. I mean, I did a lot of—like this one here on the wall is an early piece from when I was a student, but I don't think that was necessarily of anyone in particular. It was probably imagery from a combination of places. And very strange. I don't know why that painting is still hanging around, but it is. Probably because I don't ever show it. Yeah, so I guess that would answer that. That's true. That's probably the only really conscious effort to do a portrait. [Jackson added the following bracketed section during her review of the transcript.] [My first portrait in oil was Nigerian Woman, a portrait which won first prize at Tanana Valley Fair in Fairbanks, Alaska, when I was sixteen years old. This was my first professional exhibition.] I did a lot of drawings and paintings of people as a result of being in Charles White's class of children and figures. The first painting that I sold at the Watts Towers was a painting of a woman in a yellow dress. So I think basically because I'm interested in the figure. I end up using a lot of figures in my work. And I'm still interested in it.

MASON:: What does the figure represent for you?

JACKSON:: Maybe it's just my interest in people and the relationship to nature and the fact that also my belief is that we are not entities unto ourselves, that all things between us as a person and the next object or the thing that's out there or plant or animal, there are a lot of molecules and atoms that we don't see, but we're all connected from molecule to molecule. We're just big clumps of molecules and atoms and chemicals, and then we diffuse out, and there's a space between us. We are all connected. We're all connected in the universe. So I think that in much of the work and later on in experimenting, and even now what I'm doing is that connection—as opposed to here where you see this line and this separation on the outside, now I'm beginning to work more with the color on the outside, which has to with sort of an interconnection with air and ether and plants and animals and human beings. It's a spiritual kind of connection from nature to nature. I don't remember what the title of this—this is a part of that series that I did in San Francisco within that three-week period. This is called It Is the Beginning. This painting happened as a result of probably sneaking some looks through my father's Masonic books and seeing the horsemen of the apocalypse. What is that, the four horsemen or seven horsemen of the apocalypse? And strangely enough—I don't think this painting ever sold, even though someone saw a slide and they were interested in it, and by that time it had been lost in storage with the sun and the moon and the snakes. And it frightened people. I don't think it's that frightening.

MASON:: In the middle there it looks like a nuclear cloud.

JACKSON:: It's actually a tree form that I was using a lot then, that kind of tree form back in those days, and the rainbow. But evidently it just bothered a lot of people. It frightened them. This is a big painting, too. It was probably about sixty-four by seventy-two [inches], or eighty-two [inches] maybe. So it was just one of those pieces that hung around a lot.

MASON:: Did your father stay involved with Masonic activity throughout his whole life? I don't really know that much about it. Is it something that the whole family can join in?

JACKSON:: Well, I think in most families usually the women belong to Eastern Star and the men are Masons. But because my mother was Catholic, that was not anything she wanted to be involved with. Even now she's talking about giving away my father's Masonic books, because it's a non-Catholic thing. I would personally prefer it that I would have those books, because they were his. And the bizarre thing that happened when my father died was that because of my father's work in the community over in the Bay Area, and with the Catholic church there that my mother belonged to—even though she didn't go that much, they belonged to St. Emydious. And because my father worked in that community, my mother arranged for a Catholic funeral. And the people who carried his coffin were some of his Masonic brothers. And I think it was unheard of. I think that they didn't even realize that my father wasn't a Catholic, because he did so much work with the school and the children. He and my son would go to churches, whichever church they wanted to. Both of my son's grandfathers [Roy Jackson and Walter B. Smith] would take him to different churches. So sometimes they would go to a Baptist church, sometimes they'd go to an Episcopal church, sometimes they'd probably go to a Catholic church. They just went to their favorite churches where their friends were. Both of the grandfathers were such wonderful men. They were both real estate brokers. People loved them. So when my father had his funeral it was in the Catholic church. He's buried in the Catholic cemetery. And all the children from the Catholic school were out there when his coffin was carried out. That was very strange, but that was my mother's doing as well. And they'll be buried together. This painting, I don't have a title on that one, either. It's a shame that I've lost all these records where I had these. This was done at the studio on Jefferson [Boulevard] and Main [Street]. It was in one of the Ankrum Gallery exhibitions. You can see here the line is becoming a little bit cleaner, lighter. I think also this reflects living in light in Los Angeles and in the studio. Well, let me take a look. I'm not sure whether this is a large or a very small painting. This could be a painting that I did—I'm sorry, this was probably one I did in San Francisco when I was pregnant, because those were fairly small. I did a group of paintings for an exhibition, and I don't remember what that exhibition was, in 1971, early in the year. They were all sort of very clean little paintings with imagery, because they were tiny. And I think this was one of them, kind of delicate. I don't know if that reflects that sort of state you're in as a pregnant woman or what. Very reflective.

MASON:: So you said you have two sons?

JACKSON:: No, I have only one son.

MASON:: Did you give his name?

JACKSON:: Oh his name is Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi. He was born Rafiki Mhunzi. Mhunzi is the name that is the translation of Smith. Smith is his paternal grandfather and his father. His father was Pete Smith, who was a musician in Los Angeles when we were married, and I translated Smith to Mhunzi. So for the whole time Rafiki was a little boy he was Rafiki Mhunzi. His father named him Rafiki when he was born. Rafiki means "friend." It's Arabic-Swahili. Marafiki means "my friend." So he likes his name. But he calls himself Smith, because between the two grandfathers, grandparents they sort of talked him out of Mhunzi and into Smith, because they wanted to have their names used. So I think that's how that happened. Let's see. Did I talk about that piece? This is a piece that was done—I believe it may have been done as one of the last pieces in San Francisco before I moved back to Los Angeles. But it's in that sort of light vein, using a lot of the symbols of the tree and kind of heart shapes, which I got sick of after a point. But the heart shape really for me in a sense, the shape of it is Africa. The shape of it is leaves more than heart. This was done I know just before I left San Francisco, because it was one of the paintings that was shown at the University of Santa Clara at the de Sasset [Art Gallery and Museum], where there was an exhibition of women artists. There was Dianna Bates and Mary Lovelace O'Neal. I forget who the other woman was in that exhibition. [Marie Johnson Calloway] And I think that was one where they wanted—originally I think they may have wanted Arthur Monroe to have a show, and he didn't, so they recommended the women, and they did a show. It was curated by—I forget that woman's name. She had an Italian name, a double Italian name. [Lydia Modi Vitale] But there was another painting, which we may come to, which they didn't want to show because they thought it was the shroud, and the university is a Catholic university. I had not even had that impression of that painting being that, so—this is a piece called Double. I think it's owned by Paula Kirchner in Los Angeles. It's kind of a small piece, probably about the size of what we see there, about thirty-six [inches] by—no, it's not even that big. It's about twenty-four [inches] by twenty-four [inches], I think. And these were done in Los Angeles after I moved into the studio space on Jefferson and Main. I was very prolific then, because all I did was paint for sixteen hours a day. That's when the gallery, Ankrum Gallery, was helping me out with rent. And this piece—let's see, what's the title of this? This was called Old Virgin's Vision. And that I think was also shown in Santa Clara before I moved from San Francisco. I was in that exhibition, and I had already packed up my stuff. We had a great—there was a party afterwards at Marie Johnson's house, which was wonderful. We all had a good time there.

MASON:: How did you decide on that title?

JACKSON:: Old Virgin's Vision? Oh, I don't know. Sometimes titles would just come to me. Maybe it was the white hair. And I was writing poetry a lot then, so it could be that they were just images that sort of came into my head. Now, this one—I don't remember the title, but I think Vincent Price may own this one. Vincent Price liked my work a lot. It turned out that he's from St. Louis, Missouri, and when he found out I was from St. Louis for some reason he just sort of adopted me. So he made some choices of work. And that was kind of an interesting thing, because as a child my mother ordered those art seminars that you bought, the books that were from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were books of impressionism and like a whole series of different styles of art, and they had the record that went with it, and Vincent Price did the narration. And those were some of my early art books that I had when I was growing up in Alaska. So it was kind of interesting that later on I should meet him and he should buy a couple of my works and really be interested in the work. A lot of people think that's skeptical, because I guess he did a Sears Roebuck collection of art of something like that.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO AUGUST 14, 1992

JACKSON:: I think his interest was trying to get art out and making it available for average people. And a part of Gallery 32 was about making art available to people who were going out and buying cheap prints of art that they didn't even understand. A lot of the black people we know were putting records up on their walls to help decorate their living rooms. Or they would go out and buy prints by white artists. You know, they'd have those starving artists print sales, and they'd go and buy those. And for the same price that they were paying for some of those tacky reproductions they could get a real piece of art from a lot of the younger black artists. I think that probably Vincent Price was dealing with that same kind of concept with some of the things he was trying to do with art. But he was very supportive when he liked something.

MASON:: He would come to shows at Ankrum? Or he just bought through—? Or he would have private—?

JACKSON:: No, he bought through Ankrum. And then he came to my studio once or twice. When he married Coral Brown, she didn't like one of the paintings because she said the pool reflected in it or something. I know it's just crazy. So they came to the house, and he looked. He went over, and the painting he had chosen originally was the painting that he kept the second time. This was the piece on one of the shaped canvases that I had when I moved into the studio at Jefferson and Main. And there were several shaped canvases that the artist left there for me that they didn't want that were sort of hanging around from previous artists. And this I think was eventually bought by Dr. George Jackson and his wife [Pat Jackson]. She has the painting now. The interesting thing that happens is that when some of my collectors get divorces or split up, then it is who gets which paintings. But they are still in the family in a way.

MASON:: That makes it hard to keep track of, I'll bet.

JACKSON:: Well, I always know that one or the other has the painting. Usually they let me know who's got the work. And that was shown in the exhibition that was in 1974. All of these pieces now are from the period from '72 to '74. So these were shown in the 1974 exhibition at Ankrum. This was a fun exhibit in a way. The year, I think maybe 1976—it was somewhere between—I had an exhibition, I think one in '74 and one in '76. I think it was a December '75 issue maybe of Essence magazine.

MASON:: You were in Essence in '74 and '75.

JACKSON:: So '74 was the center photo that they had with all the food and everything. So this was right after the '74 exhibition. So it was kind of fun, and there were lots of people who were interested in my work. And that was kind of a period when I think black people were really beginning to enjoy theater, as well. People were going to the theater, they were enjoying the arts. It was just that little bit of tip of the edge before the recession hit hard again. You know, we'd get this little lift in the middle of each century where people think they have a little bit of money or they think that things are getting better, and it's not really true. I just realized looking at that painting how the wings of the bird and the hands all come from the hair. That was a kind of a very uplifting and light period of work. And I don't remember the title of this, where basically—I think many women—oh, this piece was entitled Fly, and it says it's in the collection of Reed Springer. I think that was a man who walked into the gallery off the street. He just happened to see the paintings in the window, and he walked into Ankrum and bought that painting. It wasn't something that he'd planned to do. He just walked in, and he liked the work very much. What is the name of this? This is a strange-looking bird. I don't know why this bird was like this. Probably because of the shape of the canvas being very long and narrow. That canvas is probably only about fourteen inches wide by about seventy-two inches long. It may be wider than that. Because the narrower painting that disappeared that was about seven inches wide by seventy-two inches long was in the series, but it was a horizontal piece. This is vertical. I believe this is—Wayne Leonard owns this one. It's kind of interesting to go through and remember who might have bought some of these. And this one, I don't have a title on it either. I think this next painting—I think this piece was published in my first book, What I Love, of the bird up really high above this tree, those small trees, which were very much a part of that early period between '69 and '70. This painting is probably about thirty—six [inches] by thirty-six [inches], I think.

MASON:: What was What I Love about? I haven't been able to get my hands on it.

JACKSON:: Somebody just called me this morning and asked me who might have a copy of it. There were actually I think a thousand or fifteen hundred copies printed. I took it to Samella Lewis and asked if their publishing company, which was—what was the name of that company then?

MASON:: It was Hancraft Studios.

JACKSON:: Hancraft, yeah. But I think they had another name to the publishing company. I'm not sure. But anyway—

MASON:: Contemporary something.

JACKSON:: Yeah, Contemporary Crafts. They did the distribution for me. So the only thing I could ask people to do was to go either to Howard Lee or to Samella to find a copy. The copy I had is in Connecticut with the man who gave me my books back. I haven't had a chance to connect with him to get my copy. Because I don't have a copy of it.

MASON:: Was it a book of poetry or essays?

JACKSON:: It was a book of my paintings and poetry, some of these early works that were from about 1968 to '72. And the poetry I guess you might say reflected that period. In some of this stuff, I may have some of the transparencies and some of the mock-up, the original mock- up. I think I did get that back from the printer, so I have those things. Some of the poetry people considered a little bit revolutionary—in the Sun Reporter. Janice Cobb [now Ahimsa Sumchai Porter] wrote a review of the book that was a very nice review, in the San Francisco Sun Reporter, which is the black newspaper. One of the things I hadn't done, and I was thinking about it, I really should have—some people immediately got their Library of Congress number on their books. What do you call it when you get the registration number and you send the copy to Library of Congress? And I haven't done that on either one of my books. I don't know how many people do that. For a while there was a trend that everybody was registering their books and having them documented that way, and I just never somehow got around to it. This was a part of the exhibition that I think I had—it was another one during the seventies, '74 or '75. And I think this was a piece that may have been sold before the show opened, as well. Sometimes collectors like to come to the studio before the show opens to look. But when you're having a show at a gallery, then you always want to give the gallery a commission as well, because they do so much in backing your show and putting it up.

MASON:: This is a different animal. It looks more like part of a lion.

JACKSON:: There was a lion. I wish I could remember the title of this. It's not on the slides. Somewhere at one point I think I had a list of all these slides, and I knew the titles to everything. I literally have not looked at these slides probably in ten years. And this was that kind of—this was when I was really beginning to have some better understanding of some African influences in my work and trying to make a connection with that transcontinental connection. You know, that kind of—

MASON:: How did that come about? What year was that?

JACKSON:: This was in the seventies, so this is probably '74.

MASON:: There was a conference in '74 in Detroit, this College Art Association, and I know there were some papers given there on Pan-African consciousness by Rosalind Jeffries and somebody else whose name slips my mind.

JACKSON:: Well, the whole period through '69, through the seventies, everybody had this sort of—the way now that there's this sort of Afrocentric kind of, then Pan-Africanism was kind of strong as a movement, you know even to the point where the men thought that they had to have many wives and people were becoming more conscious about the kind of schools they were sending their children to. Marcus Garvey schools were sort of coming up, and the Muslims' schools were becoming popular. Black people were trying to educate their children with a black consciousness. And also calling ourselves "black" as opposed to "Negroes" anymore. That all came about through the sixties and through the seventies. And now, of course, it's become "African American" as opposed to "black" so much. But then also having the space to work, having my son. And I see a little baby shape in there. You know, these were things that—and relationships. I mean, there were a lot of relationships that were going on with African consciousness.

MASON:: You talked about Buddhism and African consciousness and some other sort of philosophical ideas. Did you just kind of add things as you went along? Or did you discard things? Would you say by this time you had forgotten about Buddhism and gone on to something else?

JACKSON:: No, I don't think that—at least not for me, anyway—it's like I think that if we have any exposure to all religions—in the school that I grew up in in Alaska we just didn't read about Christianity. We read the Koran, we read about Buddhism, we read about Hinduism. We read about all religions, although it was a Catholic school. It was run by Jesuits. That's the reason we learned about all kinds of religions. We learned about all forms of politics and governments. So the kind of thinking that I grew up with was that you don't eliminate kinds of thoughts and philosophies from existence, because they are there. I probably tend to be more existential in my thinking, I think, because that was a part of my early growing up. When you get involved and you learn all these different theories and philosophies in life, then you tend to become a bit cynical about them, I think. Although I think that the spirituality that I try to understand has to do with nature and the land, which tends to be more of Indian and maybe basic African life that is connected to the earth. All basic indigenous cultures live according to the cycles of the moon and the sun and the earth and how you plant your food. So for me you can't eliminate or wipe out one. That tends to be very Western, I think. And Americans tend to be faddish about ideas and things and what's in this year and what's out this year. One year it's Nichiren Shosu chanting. I should be able to get that, because we were doing it for a while, that Buddhist philosophy. Or the next year it's a Hindu philosophy, or the next year it's transcendental meditation. During the seventies a lot of black people were getting involved in transcendental meditation. It seemed to be this sort of wonderful, peaceful thing. They'd gone out of the whole drug culture with LSD and trying out different types of drugs and free sex and all of that, and they were going into transcendental meditation as a way of sort of improving their lives and calming their lives. I knew about transcendental meditation, and I even went to one session, but it wasn't the thing exactly for me, because people tended to be more into a materialism. And even in Nichiren Shosu, people were chanting for things and to have more, and as result people started to—and people put pressure on you to come and chant. I didn't feel like that was a natural way to go. But I also believed that intrinsic philosophy. Even in Christianity the basic philosophy that's really there is a kind of a natural one that's supposed to evolve with the earth, but we don't use the philosophy that way. Men tend to turn anything or any philosophies and politics into something that has to do with war and greed and taking away from other human beings as opposed to using those philosophies for the better. We always seem to turn things around.

MASON:: I just have two questions. Was est [Erhard Seminars Training] a big movement in Los Angeles among black people in the seventies?

JACKSON:: I'm trying to remember. I don't remember est so much. I think there were some people into est, but I think that tended to be more maybe people who were crossing cultures. I think there were more white people who were into that. And that seemed to be something that I knew more from up here in the Bay Area. But I think there were some. For a while there were people who were getting into even Scientology and all that until they realized they had to pay tons of money to get into Scientology. But basically the thing that I was interested in was meditation. Later on I became involved with Self-Realization Fellowship, which I'm still involved with as far as meditation. And there is no sin. You may make a mistake, but there's not all that structure. And it doesn't matter what religion you belong to, you still can meditate. And there's a basic way you try to behave toward other people.

MASON:: And then the other question was, I guess we've been using the terms "Indian," "African," and things like that, and some people would say, "Well, you can't really talk about African philosophy, because Africa's made up of so many different countries and India of so many tribes." Often, you know, you can't compare the philosophy of West Africa to that of East Africa and South Africa.

JACKSON:: That's right.

MASON:: But what's your point of view concerning the compatibility or non-compatibility of different philosophies in Africa with each other? So you would be interested in something specific like Yoruba culture.

JACKSON:: I think that a true basic, basic, basic philosophy of most of the original people of the earth is very similar as far as relationship to the land and having respect for the land and food coming from the land, moving and living with the cycles of the earth that are natural that happen as opposed to abusing land and nature, having respect for it as opposed to the way we live now, especially in this Western culture. And I think overall if you go into many cultures within Africa, many of the different cultures, the basic philosophy is there that has to do with the respect for nature and the land and living from that. India, China, Tibet—so there's a basic spirituality that I think exists in the world, but it has been diffused, or we don't recognize it in many cultures. Because we tend to want to make ideas, things, useful for ourselves, each one of us, so we become confused and twisted. I think that my tendencies toward the things that I appreciate in Africa tend to be more of maybe desert people, North African people, some of the South African people who live in the mountains and ride horses. I don't know the lineage of my family going back to West Africa. I know that my grandmother [Margaret Bell Terry Butler] said we were Egyptian. Her father was Egyptian. I was married to a Yoruba man [Funmi Odusolu] for a year. And that's an incredible culture. And the basic philosophies are there. Even though Nigerians are very similar to me; they are the way we are here in America. They lie and they cheat and they steal, and they especially do. But we abuse. Men abuse. And I say men because men do abuse, and then women fall into the trap with them and abuse. I think women have a different approach to life and nature and tend to be more air and earth bound in a more spiritual kind of sense just because of the responsibilities that we have. I think men have sort of deluded themselves into thinking that they have to be warlike and aggressive in everything that they do.

MASON:: That's being very creative, because I remember—I think I was reading James Baldwin, and he talked about the differences between men and women, and he said basically what you are saying. Women, because they have childbearing and have to feed their families, they have a sense of responsibility. But at the same time he was saying that's why women don't dream, because women have these basic philosophies, and that's why men can go off and do these crazy things. That's why they get all messed up psychologically, because they're not bound to the earth. So you would agree with that?

JACKSON:: Yeah, now especially. There was one time that I may not have totally agreed with that, but I do now. I really think that—

MASON:: You think that men have a richer creative life than women do?

JACKSON:: No, I don't. I think that—oh, no I don't. I really don't think men have a richer creative life. I think they are really confused. And especially in this country what's happened to black men, who really are not able to realize themselves at all, even the ones who supposedly know themselves a little better. I won't use the word "successful," but who—it's very confusing in this culture, this Western culture, for men and women, you know, black men and women. We don't really belong here. And we didn't ask to be here. But because all of these European values and materialism are mixed in with who we are, then we are confused, and our children get confused. Even when we try to set a basic philosophy and ideas in our children's heads along the way, they still have to go out and live in the world. And when they go out and live in the world they become something else. It's like raising vegetarian babies. But as soon as they go to grandma and grandpa's house, grandma and grandpa are going to be sure to give them meat, or they're going to go to school and their friends are going to have meat. So this balance is really hard to sort of meet. And you have to allow people to find their own way in the world. I think that's what my painting has been about all along. Like this one. This one is called Triptych for Stephen. This was a commission, actually, from Stephen Chase for a piece. And from what I understand he actually gave it to his friend, Hal Broderick. They used to work for Arthur Elrod and Associates. But he gave it to his partner. This was a combination of all those things from nature that I loved and spiritual things that are combined. When I do it I put the elements there, and then people take it and they put their own thoughts and their own feelings into whatever it is. It's like visually for it to be pleasing. These are all about seventy-two inches tall, I think, and I don't remember how wide. That could be about eleven feet wide by seventy-two inches tall. I don't know. As we grow older we just have different experiences, and those experiences and maybe even disappointments in the way that we understand things come out. This was in the old studio at Jefferson and Main. You can see there how big it was. Now it makes this studio look really small. Those paintings were done for—I think these are the ones that were commissioned by Sonny Bono. He's really bizarre. He's put these in his basement, I think, because he was afraid they were going to get dirty. He wanted me to do a commission for his restaurant off La Cienega [Boulevard] and Melrose Place, and I suggested, "Why don't you just use the paintings that I did for you earlier?" He was afraid somebody was going to steal them off the wall. Now, if anybody can walk out with those two paintings that are—

MASON:: They almost reach the ceiling.

JACKSON:: Something like ninety-six inches tall by—I mean, these were huge pieces. That's a thirteen-foot ceiling, so you can see how big those paintings were. It was a diptych, and each panel is at least six feet, I think, by—maybe five feet by seven or eight feet. No, what's that? That's about ten feet tall maybe. Yeah. So they're big paintings. And I don't think that anybody could just walk out with something like that. But people are very strange. You don't like to see your paintings just hidden away. These are called Wind and Water. That was in the seventies, as well. Oh, this is a detail from those. Yeah, I loved that studio. It was really wonderful. This was just the studio space. There were five thousand square feet altogether in this space. It was about a block long, and it was the top of the building. That was a wonderful studio with windows all around and really high ceilings. The focus on this isn't very good. I wonder—maybe this thing focuses better. Oh, I guess that's about—okay. Oh, this was a piece—this was the largest painting that I've ever done. And this painting is—wait a minute. Yeah, here it is. This painting is called In a Black Man's Garden, and it's owned by Dorothy Tucker. She bought the whole thing. And each panel is one hundred seven by eighty-three inches. This is the center panel, and it shows the figure of a black man. Now, curiously enough—let's see. For some strange reason this is the only slide that's in here. I think what happened was that I sent off a group of slides for a government commission, and they were supposed to return the slides to me and they never did. I'm realizing that the slides that are missing in here are the ones that were sent off to Savannah, Georgia. They said they'd return them, and they never did. It's really hard, because people ask for slides, and you really want to maybe be involved in whatever it is that's going on, but to go out and reproduce slides so many times, it's very expensive, so sometimes out of desperation you have sent the originals. This is a painting called Muse. And it's one of the paintings that was lost in Los Angeles. It's eighty-two [inches] by eighty-two inches. This was in the studio at Hobart [Boulevard]. And you can see my garden out there. I had a back garage that was good studio space, and then I had several rooms in the house. It was a big Victorian house that everyone got to know. Then across the street I also had a storefront which was a studio space.

MASON:: Was this near Bill [William] Pajaud's studio, who had a studio—?

JACKSON:: I don't know where he was. This was at—

MASON:: He was near Golden State [Mutual Life Insurance Company], the new one.

JACKSON:: Yeah, yeah. This was at Hobart and Venice [Boulevard], which was just near Western [Avenue]. It was the part that was just burned down [in the Los Angeles uprising of 1992]. I watched them on television burn the shopping center down. It was when they had that police hand-to-hand barricade. I realized it was right around the corner from where I used to live, which was right in the center of Los Angeles. So that was really kind of amazing to see that. That was a wonderful old Victorian house. Let's see. I think maybe because these are the earlier works—now, I think this one may have been lost also in storage. This was called La Liberté. And maybe it's a good thing that these are the ones that are on tape since they're the missing paintings. That was that period in the seventies. And I think in these I felt very self-conscious about the figure, because I would always start drawing the figure better, but somehow I'd abstract the shapes and things. People didn't seem to mind, but now I'm a little curious about what I'll be drawing because the figures may be too precise. I don't know. This is a piece that is now owned by Rafiki's grandfather [Walter B.] Smith, a little circular painting. Let's see what else I can find in here. I'm just sort of pulling them out randomly now. Oh, this is a detail of those two I was showing you yesterday, Ace and Queen. And these were fairly good-sized paintings that were done around the late seventies when I was in the CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] project, but they weren't done for CETA; they were just independent pieces I was working on in the studio. This looks as if that was in process. This was Queen. I think these may have been shown at the last exhibition I had at Ankrum, '78 [Suzanne Jackson]. But these are also two pieces that have disappeared. I have no idea where they are. They're lost. [Jackson added the following bracketed section during her review of the transcript.] [These two paintings were shown at the inaugural exhibition of the California Afro-American Museum.]

MASON:: That theme of Ace and Queen, did that have a particular meaning?

JACKSON:: No. It was funny. They were just sort of experiments that were kind of bizarre, I think, and not even really shown, because they were lost. Something I was working on then. Oh, I thought I'd see the top, the size of them. But they were very large paintings, as well. And I think there was just maybe a reaction while we were doing the CETA projects and I was working in murals, kind of a reaction to some of the sensuousness of some of the people that I knew at that time and the interaction of people that we were dealing with in the CETA project. This is one of the early mixed-media works on paper that I was doing that were a little more abstracted. And I remember Mrs. Ankrum's response to it. Some of these she liked very much, and I think these did sell, but her reaction was, "Oh, you can do better than that!" Because they were more abstract and less figurative then some of the things that I had been doing.

MASON:: How is this mixed media?

JACKSON:: There is a combination of acrylic and some graphite and maybe some watercolor and ink in several of these. These were just shapes of heart or large brushy strokes on paper. And this was a whole mixed-media series, too. These are graphite. And this was part of that series, the Violet that I showed you. That was put in the women's calendar that came out. This was when I was beginning to really use a thicker amount of paint. Oh, this is a large drawing that is in Connecticut now. I think it may be called Kiss Me. No, that's not Kiss Me. It's called Yes, We Do! And it's a really large drawing. It's probably the largest drawing I've done. It's about three feet by five feet. This machine is a little out of focus. Let me see what else I can pull up here out of this. I'm just sort of randomly grabbing slides now. Oh, that was later. That was like the 1978 exhibition. This was very washy color, mixed media. Most of these are on illustration board, double weight illustration board. And this was a little painting on illustration board that is mixed media. I was using a lot of graphite with turpentine and oil pastel and some acrylic base on these. A little more abstract than some of the ones—let's see what we get through here. And this is part of that series, too. These were all from the Ankrum exhibition in 1978. How are we doing with the tape there?

MASON:: The tape is okay. You don't have to rush through it. Because I'm afraid on the transcript, when you read it it's going to say this is from this exhibition, and people aren't going to really know what it is.

JACKSON:: This is the one that I think I showed you yesterday where originally this was done for Bill Pleasant as a commission for the opening of the Pacific Design Center. It's a round piece. And it was shown in a room with—it was a small room, and there was a display with fabric, very busy fabric, and a pretty little vermeil table. But later on I overpainted this and simplified it, because it was a really busy piece. And I think it's owned by Craig and Bette Laucks. Now, I was happy with the way the painting turned out later on in its overlay and simplification and the use of color. This is much nicer. Oh, that's me working on the mural up on the Crenshaw [Boulevard] wall in my boots, which I still have. Those boots—I can't possibly get in those jeans though. This mural was about eleven feet tall by fifty-eight and a half feet long. And in the process of this, because that wall was a retaining wall, and the people who lived up on the street above watered their lawns, all the water would come down through that wall. So it meant constantly having to prick the undercoat, the primer, having to make sure that any bubbles that appeared in that had to be pricked and primed properly. It was really a whole process of working on this wall to insure that at least the painting would last for the year or so that it was supposed to be up until the next person came to paint over it. I think these paintings—this whole series, this was a beautiful wall. Dan Concholar painted, I painted, I think David Hammons did something on that wall. And maybe a couple of the apprentices from the apprentice program, maybe Richard Delgado or I don't know whether Tom Corn did anything. The wall lasted longer than just one year. It was up for a couple of years, I think, and then the new set of artists came through and painted. But that was a fun one to do. I did that in between trying to be the artist coordinator for the CETA program. And this was the other end of it. I think it actually goes this way.

MASON:: What was it called?

JACKSON:: This one I think was called Wind. Yeah, this was Wind. And the one that I did on the New Health Center was called Spirit. And both of these, I think—yes, in the Los Angeles Times there was an article written, and this was photographed. They did a kind of shot with the camera that took the whole wall in, so it was kind of a circular look. What do you call that when they use a lens that takes in the—?

MASON:: Wide angle.

JACKSON:: Wide-angle lens. So they got the whole mural with a number of us that were working on the CETA project all together in front. I'm sitting on the street.

MASON:: How did you learn how to paint murals, how to put the undercoat and everything on? Was it similar to painting any other surface?

JACKSON:: Yeah, basically. It's like if you're going to paint something well, then you've got to prime the wall, and you've got to know what the surface is. And maybe in the process also of talking—Kent Twitchell was also on this project. I think Kent Twitchell may have had a mural on that wall. Kent had done a number of murals around. Those of us who paint very large, you study surfaces, and you know what the surfaces will do. You study what kind of paint will hold on the surface. The fortunate thing—for example, this wall was harder because of the fact that the paint came through. So you sort of exchange notes with other artists who have worked on murals before and different kinds of wall and what their problems have been, and you experiment. You test to see how the surface will hold paint. This wall was more difficult because of that wet backing. That's a wall that would always have problems. But the New Health Center, for example, had a really pebbly surface from the stuff that they had coated the outside of the building with, so it had a real nubby, strong surface, which a lot of artists may have not liked. But I loved it, because it held the way that I paint, where I could do underlays of color, I could do overlays. Some of the color would go deep down into the heavy concrete structural stuff of the plaster on the outside, and some would sit in the center, and some of it would sit just across the top surface of the pebbly surface of the wall. So for me that wall was absolutely wonderful, because I had all of these sort of layers of texture that I could play with on the new health center mural. That's the reason it takes a long time to develop a mural, from the drawings to—well, with us, we had to go to the person who owned the building and talk that person into maybe coming up with money for the materials to paint the wall and get permission to paint the walls. This is part of the series of drawings that I have done—well, I haven't done them recently? '86 I guess is that last time I did any of these. I don't know what I'll do next if I get into these. This was from the time that I moved from my house at Hobart and over to the little house at Los Feliz, which was a very clean little house. Even though I had studios in the back room and in the dining room, I bought a Persian rug, and I would draw in the dining room on the Persian rug. So these drawings were very meditative. This was part of the time that I was meditating three times a day, as well, so they're kind of a spiritual group. Now, people see these and they really like them very much. And at that time people just couldn't get into them because there were no black images in the drawings. Black people always want to see black images in the drawings.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE AUGUST 14, 1992

JACKSON:: I just cheated a little bit, and went back to the mural up on the Crenshaw [Boulevard] wall because I found that long view. This was taken a little bit later than when I was working on it, so you can see where all the foliage has grown up at the top. That was sort of the center of it. You can get kind of a long image of what it is. Now, maybe in these next slides—well, I'm going to stick this one in. This is another mixed-media piece.

MASON:: I was going to ask you which murals still exist?

JACKSON:: None. That was part of my real disappointment and not wanting to go back to Los Angeles. I walked into my attorney [Arnold Johnson]'s office one day, and he said, "Maybe you'd better go check on your mural, because I'm representing the new man who owns the building, and he might paint the mural away." And I said, "If you're representing him, you represent me also and you should let him know that that's public domain." There is a law now. And I think there is one artist who actually sued because they painted out his painting from a building. I don't know exactly how the law goes. It has something to do with the fact that part of the money that was used was federal money, and it is public and it belongs to the public. Therefore, the person who owns the building can be sued if they destroy a public work of art. At the time that law didn't exist. And I suppose I could go back, but I read that somewhere in 1988, that this artist had actually sued and he actually won the case. I went over to look at the building, and the mural was gone. It had been there for four years and not one mark had been put on it in the community. And that was devastating for me. That was a piece of art that I did. It took me two years in the process and a year to paint it. It was done for the people in the community, and the people in the community participated in it, because they came along, and we talked about it, and they cheered me along. And they felt as if it was theirs, the people at least who passed by. And it was the only place along Western [Avenue] where there was any piece of art, public art, that people could see as they rode along on the bus. Evidently the building was owned by Dr. George Jackson, and he was going through a lot of financial problems. And from my understanding it had to do with either he or his son and too much cocaine or something. And I'll say that on tape. That's how I lost my mural. And I had a great respect for him. He was a collector who collected a lot of art. And I didn't have to do too much fighting to get him to put up the money for the mural. The amount of money that he put up for the mural is what he'd paid for a small painting at different times—you know, just for the supplies. So he was very cooperative. And he let us store the scaffolding inside. But through a series of financial difficulties he lost the building. And the black man who bought the building thought he was improving the building by painting out the mural. And it was right across the street from the hospital where a lot of the doctors worked. They watched the process, and they let the mural get wiped out. I was living in the mountains at that time. It sort of put a bitter taste in my mouth as far as the way people dealt with the art in Los Angeles, just a certain amount of not caring at all. Many of us who worked on that CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] project, we were being paid $800 a month, and we were expected to either talk somebody into giving us money for supplies—we were expected to do major works of art. People who were working in sculpture, especially, were expected to find a site, get permission from the city or the local government or the person who owned the building site, and get all the legal permits or whatever was necessary, and then out of your $800 or the money you could get from that person put up a major piece of sculpture or a major mural. So it was difficult, even though Alonzo [Davis]'s CETA project was the only one—the Brockman Gallery project was the only one in the country where the artists were only hired to make art and they didn't have to do anything else. I mean, they didn't have to do social work, they didn't have to go teach, they didn't—although we initiated programs, workshops, and exhibitions out of what we were doing that could be shared with the public. But it was a very difficult time to make a small amount of money and have to live and pay studio space and buy supplies and be able to do reports and all of that.

MASON:: How long did the CETA project last?

JACKSON:: It was two years at Brockman. There may have been a third year, but for me it was two years. I think each artist was allowed only two years on the CETA program. And then they expected you to develop some kind of work or income in order to work your way off the CETA project. So I ended up doing a couple of projects like putting together exhibitions, and I had them at my house, and then also working as a consultant for some of the doctors that I knew, helping them to put art in their offices. I did two of those, two or three. But as a result, the next word that I heard was that I was no longer an artist, I was an art consultant. This was the word that was being put out in the white community, in the general overall art community, that I was no longer a painter. And this was when all these art consultants were starting to come into the fore of things, and that wasn't the case at all. It was sort of what had developed out of the CETA project. So that's the way rumors go. I got a telephone call this morning that said I was married and living in Nigeria all these years, which was a plan, but it didn't ever happen.

MASON:: You were also in charge of hiring other artists at the Brockman CETA project?

JACKSON:: Well, I was the artist coordinator, which meant that I participated in the panel or the group. For example, there might be Alonzo and me and a couple of other people who would interview the artist and look at portfolios.

MASON:: These were just random artists who came in and wanted work?

JACKSON:: Well, they were people who applied. It's like the job application would be put out and published, and then the artist would apply according to whether or not that job description looked as if that was someplace that they wanted to work, if they wanted to work with Brockman and make that much money and work on the project for a year and try it out. So usually most of the artists who applied were very good artists. I don't remember exactly, and I have still some of the records in Los Angeles. I think that if there were any artists who didn't make it on the program it was because maybe they were really, really young, inexperienced artists who really didn't have a portfolio yet, or they just hadn't had enough experience. Some of those artists were—even the apprentice artists, Tom Corn and—I'm trying to remember—Tom was my assistant; that's why I always remember him. Richard Delgado I think started as an apprentice, and then he was the next year able to get on to the regular program as a regular artist. [Jackson added the following bracketed section during her view of the transcript.] [A partial listing of apprentices: Talita Long, Georgia "Jonesy" Gilmore, Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor, John Grimes, Greg Bryant.]

MASON:: Why do you say apprentice?

JACKSON:: Well, each artist had—the way it was written up at Brockman there were artists on the regular program, and then there were apprentice artists who worked with the regular artists as assistants. So you could work with—it's like a younger artist or less experienced artist worked as an assistant with another artist. Or they, some of them, had their own mural program where some of them also went out and they could do a mural on the Crenshaw wall or in other places. So each apprentice artist might work on a mural of their own, but they also were assistants to the other artists. I don't remember whether they made the same amount of money or less money. They may not have made as much. Or they didn't have to have as many hours. I don't remember exactly how that works. But it's in all the files that Alonzo has, and I have some of those files in Los Angeles. But that all happened under the umbrella of the California Confederation of the Arts. But Alonzo's gallery—I think Alonzo and I were two of the people who, if we did a show or we owed the artist money, we paid the artists. And they were paid on time. The one thing I can say is that on the Brockman CETA project, when payday came, you got paid your money. A lot of people found Alonzo difficult for some strange reason. I think it was just that he was quiet and secretive sometimes. But basically his programs were always clean. When I worked there, what he said he was going to do in the proposal he did. We tried to be as fair to the artists as we could. When I had the consultant program, where basically I worked on this lease option thing with the artists, I paid the artists. I would pay the artists first. I would work it out so that the collector, the person who was wanting the art in their business, would pay the fees for framing, would pay for the truck rental to get the art in and out. They paid me a separate fee for installation, and then every month they paid the artist a rental fee with an option to buy. Toward the end it was difficult collecting money because they were having some financial problems, but I always made sure the artists were paid. Even when I had Gallery 32 I paid the artists first. Artists are difficult people to work with. They always think that they deserve something that they aren't necessarily supposed to get, or other people are supposed to respond to their decision for a kind of lifestyle that we've been made to choose. This is called Golden I think, and it's in Los Angeles now.

MASON:: I had a couple of other questions about the CETA project which I might as well ask since it has come up.

JACKSON:: Okay.

MASON:: I've heard where the Brockman CETA program worked with the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art and another group called Artists for Economic Advancement [AFEA]. Is that correct?

JACKSON:: We worked with a number of institutions, because at that time I was also still on the California Arts Council, the first year. I may have resigned the second year. And Alonzo was on some of the panels. Everybody at that time, because of the nature of the California Arts Council being an artists' art council, the arts were alive. I mean, people were just working, and people were individually and collectively being advocates for the arts. There was a group called Advocates for the Arts which was started by artists. There was the California Confederation of the Arts. There was LACE [Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions] gallery. There was MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art]. All those galleries in Los Angeles that are now in existence, some of them came out of that period of time where artists independently wanted to have their own venue, their own places for showing their work, or different ways to show their works. Brockman worked with a lot of organizations around town. People were exchanging with exhibitions and artists. People were trying to cooperate with each other as much as possible. And, you know, the question always is for black artists especially, why is it that we are always included in black art exhibitions and black articles? You don't say white artists are in a white show. I think there may have been even an exhibition—and I don't know if I was involved; I think I was involved in that—where artists chose other artists. So some of the black artists may have chosen some white artists, or there may have been some exhibitions where white artists chose some black artists. It was a couple of exchanges.

MASON:: At the Brockman Gallery?

JACKSON:: At the [Los Angeles] Municipal Art Gallery. Josine Ianco-Starrels put together a couple of shows like that. Now, Josine was someone who at the Municipal Art Gallery would have a show that maybe had a theme. She chose artists according to how they maybe reflected part of what that theme was and it didn't matter who they were. If you were black, white, Asian, Chicano—

MASON:: There's a recent show at the [Pasadena] Armory Center [for the Arts] where she's got Marvin Harden, Raymond Saunders, plus some Asian artists, plus some white artists.

JACKSON:: Yeah. I was wondering what had happened to Josine, if she was still around, because I noticed she's not the director at the Municipal Art Gallery anymore.

MASON:: I don't know what's she's doing, but she did curate the show. I think it's still up at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts.

JACKSON:: Oh, that's good, because actually one of the very first exhibitions I was in in Los Angeles, way back in 1968 or '69—that's when I met Fred Eversley. It was a small image show that Josine put together out at [California] State University Los Angeles. And I think Dan [Concholar] was in that show, and I was, and David Hammons, and a number of other artists. She's one person who has always shown all the artists mixed together, not just having a black show or a white show or a Chicano show or an Asian show. I can say that. And I think that's what a lot of the black artists would probably prefer. You get tired of just being in a black art show. Or somebody is calling you up because they're doing [a show] only on black women artists because they only know about black women artists. I got a call today about that. And she [Daphne Beneke] didn't know these black women artists existed, so many. And I said to her, "Maybe it's because we've been in shows and our names are just listed." If you look in Who's Who in American Art, for example, you see artists listed, but you don't know necessarily if they're black artists just by reading through. You see the name. In the listings in most of the magazines you just see the name, and it doesn't say what color you are.

MASON:: Unless you are kind of in the know and you know what the Watts [Summer] Festival of Art is and the members.

JACKSON:: Yeah. But generally you know in the general listing that's the way it is. And I think that that's what happens is that the black artists are exclusively always shown only in exhibitions which point them out as being what they are as opposed to theme exhibitions. And I think part of that is our own fault, as well, because many shows that we have aren't really theme exhibitions or about a problem or a frame of reference because of how we're working or experimenting; it's always just a group of black artists. And the work could not have any relationship to each other in any way shape or form. I think in the exhibition 19Sixties: [A Cultural Awakening Re-evaluated. 1964-1975, at the California Afro-American Museum], the idea supposedly was that this was a group of people working together at the same time. But basically it was about those people working in assemblage, and those of us who worked on canvas or who were painters or who drew really didn't fit in the show the way it was done. Even Charles White didn't fit into the show, even though he was the teacher of all of us as far as just taking the medium. Because the emphasis really was about those people who were working out of the remains of the Watts Festival or the Watts riots. So there was that kind of division line. In a sense it didn't quite work. I think that there were some of those people who work in assemblage who also worked on paper, and none of their work was shown. So if there had been a better balance of that, where those people had also been represented, then the theme might have functioned better.

MASON:: I guess there are some artists who, for whatever reason, broke away from that. You just mentioned Fred Eversley. He hasn't done a "black" show for quite a long time. Or even Marvin Harden. It seems that there were some people who—or Wilbur Haynie, maybe. I mean, they are often included in the surveys of black artists, but when you look at where they've exhibited—

JACKSON:: Well, the thing is the form that they're using. Fred works in acrylic resins. He's one of the few, and he's also one of the first using that form. That form appeals more to the mainstream art. He also has had major commissions from major oil companies and hotels. And he was just in Madrid during the Olympics with an exhibition. You know there are a number of other artists now—Martin Puryear. I wanted to go down and see his exhibition in Los Angeles. His first show sold out back East. I remember seeing his work, and I thought, "Gosh, the craftsmanship was so beautiful." And this was something passed down, because his family were carpenters. So as a sculptor he works, and just the form has evolved. But in the old days there were a number of artists whose worked evolved that way, and they were simply artists working. They weren't put into a category as just being black artists. Mel [Melvin] Edwards and Danny [Daniel LaRue] Johnson. There's a whole bunch of people. Maren [Hassinger] came along. Maren was on the CETA project with us. And because of the form and the way she works and because it appeals to the other artists—even my work in a sense—I didn't fit in anybody's categories in a lot of ways. Because I'm black, of course, I was included with black artists. So was Maren. They'll talk about Fred even as a black artist. But because I also didn't align myself with the feminist movement, the women didn't call on me that many times, or I wasn't included with the feminist artists. So it depends sometimes on who you alienate and who you don't alienate or where you've been placed. Maybe if I had not discovered the black artists by accident or aligned myself or just gotten to know a lot of black artists, then the same thing could have happened to me, as well. If I'd had a studio in Venice as opposed to being downtown, the same thing could have happened. If I'd remained in Echo Park and not sort of moved through the city, then I may never have met a lot of the black artists and shown with them that much. I may have ended up staying in my studio. My original orientation was as it is now, to be in my studio, to work. I just had more fun with some of the black artists. It just happened that we had a lot of late-night discussions, and they liked my gallery space that I had. And it happened by accident that they just sort of—and they turned out to be the people who were not being shown. But there was a mixture, because there was Elizabeth Leigh-Taylor, there was the artist from Hawaii—I can't remember his name now, which is terrible—and there were several other people who also showed in the gallery. There was an Asian artist from Japan who had these fetal babies in huge canvases that were sort of incredible. They were like his comment on what had happened in Hiroshima. He had this incredible exhibition at my gallery. He didn't sell any paintings because people couldn't deal with what the subject matter was. But these were artists who would not be shown otherwise. And that's the reason that anything could happen at Gallery 32. When I moved away and I came up here, I guess, to Northern California and worked on the black arts festival [Black Expo '72] up here, that probably made more of an alignment with black artists. Also just studying African art. Just that whole period. You just start to recognize who you are. I'm a black artist still. I'm a woman. But for me right now it's important to do the work. I don't think that I'm going to show very soon in any group shows. If I have another solo show it's going to be a show where I'm invited to do it and the expenses are taken care of and I don't have to hassle with amateurish people who don't know how to put an exhibition together. As Charles White once said, "I want to be treated in the manner that I'm not accustomed to." That's the way he put it. Am I going to be treated in the manner I'm not accustomed to? And I feel as if I am accustomed to being treated in a certain manner because of the way I was just used to doing things early on, and I don't feel like doing things halfway or in a slipshod manner or just putting up an exhibition for the sake of having a show. That's not important anymore. What's important is to do some good work, to make a statement in the work, to solve some problems in the work. The next time I show, then, there has to be a reason, and there has to be some meaning to the work, not just some work that's put out because "time to do another show," or we're going to throw some stuff together, you know, a bunch of paintings. "There are a bunch of paintings in the studio, therefore you must have show." If the paintings don't work together, or if they don't make an important statement, there is no reason to show. There just has to be a process that's worked through that has a reason for being.

MASON:: Have we already gone past the period where you were up at Idyllwild?

JACKSON:: No, we haven't come there yet. This is the mural that was done on the New Health Center, the one that was up for four years that I was very upset about that was painted over. This one's called Spirit, and this painting actually was a combination of all the painting that I think that I had ever done. I realized once it was finished that there were a lot of elements in this work that were cumulative from all the paintings that I'd ever done. And it was twenty-eight and a half feet high by I think sixty-three feet long. This slide projector is really fuzzy. For some reason everything seems out of focus. Usually these slides are really sharp. It was an impressive piece of work to go by on the bus and see. The color was really wonderful in it. And the color stayed because of some of my theories about glazes. I actually, in the process of developing my painting was one of the—I think I was one of the first people to develop glazing with acrylic paints. Now there are books out, I know, about glazing and all of that, but most people didn't want to deal with acrylic paints because they were too flat. And I started using Nova Color paints. Many of the artists in Los Angeles used Nova Color paints on murals from Artex [Manufacturing Company] paints in Culver City. It was a Mexican father and son, Mark [Amparan]—the father died—the Amparan family. They originally made glazes for ceramics. And because they're Mexican, the color is very intense. It's like pure pigment in the color. So their acrylic paints were less expensive then any of these things that you have out here in the market. They're more flexible than, for example, Liquitex, which was usually very flat. There's a paint that people use up here called Golden, which I understand once it's down it kind of cracks; it's not as flexible on the surface. But Nova Color paints—and this is the reason I don't have any paint right now. I'm just waiting to accumulate some money so I can go down to Los Angeles or have them ship up some paint to me. Because their colors are very vibrant. They can be used very, very washy and watery, or they can be used very thick. And what I developed was to use the glazes in between with the gels and to use that same technique of layering the paints and glazing the paints so that the translucency and the transparencies come through, and the acrylic paint becomes much more alive and vibrant than it would be in its normal state, which is just very flat. That was just something that I worked on from the early sixties. What happened was that beautiful paint set that my father [Roy Dedrick Jackson] bought for me when I was sixteen was stolen. When I lived in Echo Park, a friend drove my car down to the market and left the back windows open, and somebody stole the whole paint kit—probably thinking it was a briefcase—and they got all ray paints and brushes. So I was left with some paints that I had bought from Malcolm Lubliner again, from the photographer who decided he wasn't going to paint anymore. For $75 I bought all his paints and brushes. And he had a bunch of acrylic paints and things, so that was how I sort of started experimenting. Some of those early paintings were made with paint that was left over from his studio. That's really funny how one person who is so obscure, that I would think has not really had much of an impact in my life—he's like a person who walked through that we knew who was a friend. And he would always come through with a bit of information. That's what happened living in Echo Park. And I don't have any idea of where he is now or what he does. Oh, that's another detail from that. This was about ether and spirit. I found a quote which I wrote down, which I think was from a Hindu book, about ether and spirit and water and all things in the universe and an essence. And when I found that saying, after I finished the mural I realized that that was what the mural was really all about; it was about this essence. I had little drops of ether and air that sort of floated through that mural that you could see. This is almost the end. Oops, here's this slide that was from the original of the boy. He was supposed to be back there with those other two, with the boy and the girl. That was kind of a Beatle-looking image. But that was one of those paintings that I showed at the Watts Festival. [laughs] That should be way back here. Actually, let me put it over here. And I've got two more here toward the end. Oh, here is another detail from the big mural. Most of the newer works beyond this period—the ones I showed you yesterday that were in those five [inch] by seven [inch] transparencies, those are all from the eighties. Somewhere I had slides of those things, but they are not in this batch. They may be slides that are lost.

MASON:: Do you want to pick out some of those transparencies or talk about how they suit the stuff you're doing now?

JACKSON:: Okay. There is one more here I'm trying to find in this. This is strange. Okay. I was trying to find that one slide that was the marker slide for this whole thing that showed the studio, but I guess not. Well, let me turn the light on for a second here. [tape recorder off]

MASON:: So we're looking at the transparencies, and we're going to talk about the eighties and the transition from the seventies to the eighties.

JACKSON:: Okay. I think this is probably the least favorite period for most people because of the transition, which had to do with a number of things, I think, in my life that happened. My father died, and I was also meditating a lot. I had some personal transitions that I went through with people. So basically here in this series of these drawings I sort of developed this technique of putting the black graphite pencil down and then overworking it in colored pencil. That's how some of this series developed with the cyclamen and lily leaves. And I did a whole group of things in this vein. Most of these are at Sharon Roger's house now. She's keeping them for me. But it was a period that was really hard for people to sort of deal with. I think when I exhibited I had these works, some of the Savannah works, and then these mixed-media pieces with the really bright color that are sort of abstract in here. These were fairly large sized—they're about thirty-six [inches] by forty-eight [inches]—for a drawing. They're mixed-media acrylic paint, graphite, and colored pencils. This one has a little collage piece in here. And I think they represent a major transition as far as the use of color and getting away from this just with the white background. And to me it represents kind of a more mature point of view about paint and what paint does.

MASON:: I'm not sure I know what you mean.

JACKSON:: Well, it's just beginning to develop the paint and the space and the spatial relationships. Even though this white background is different, and most people would not dare to do that, there's also a point where it's beginning to develop the spatial relationship differently with color and paint. It takes a different kind of process. And although these whites that I used were not always just one white—there were many kinds of whites in these backgrounds that I was using. For example, in here, in El Paradiso. there are several kinds of whites in here. And this was kind of a beginning also of what was beginning to happen in these paintings. And because people were so used to seeing only a white background—but then, of course, the murals that I did didn't have only white backgrounds, and nobody objected to those murals being full of paint. I hadn't even thought about that. And it's just a different use of paint now. It's a use of total paint and texture with the paint and dealing with the whole surface in another kind of way, which pulls up the color. And the translucencies differently. People didn't mind it, I think, in—because they were so used to seeing my work with a whole white background. And in here, for example, in this mixed-media drawing, there are different kinds of whites that are in here. But I'm beginning also—what I would do is I may have started with a surface like this, and then I would have gone into the paint and isolated some shapes by the use of the white paint.

MASON:: So when you say surface like this—just to be clear for the transcription—you would say a surface full of color and with a few shapes worked out, and then—

JACKSON:: The underpainting in all my work, even those paintings with really strong white backgrounds, usually has color. So that what happens in, for example, a white like this in this mixed-media drawing is that here the stubble stroke of the brush makes a texture where also you see some of the undercolor coming through, and in other places it's more white. But there are variations in the white because of the underpainting that's there, because what I did was isolate some of the shapes and forms by using that white paint. Here I used some white paint in some of the shape and form, but I used less of it, or I didn't use any at all. Or I used, for example, in this one with the leaves and the hands—which I think is called Mute Gold, this piece—I used iridescent color as opposed to using white. So that an iridescent gold or the iridescent bronze replaces what used to be white paint. Or an overlay of a cadmium yellow or a golden color over the greens and blues does what the white paint used to do. But the blues and the greens and the other colors come through, and then you just have this translucency of a lighter color like the gold or the yellow over those greens, which to me is beginning to go into some surfaces and some other connotation, which is just another variation on some of the things I was doing with the white paint. It's a different understanding of what the object is or what surrounds the object. I think at that time I was working on one of the statements I may have written. It was about dealing with the aura around the objects, surrounding the objects, and that connection again that I was talking about, the objects and whatever, the objects having a relationship to one another because of atoms, protons, and this sort of union that is physically and spiritually there from one thing to the next—plants, trees, animals, human beings. So that basically that aura takes on color as opposed to the noncolor, which was color, but it was just white color. I had a theory when I graduated from college about whites, and that's what I was experimenting with, the many, many colors of whites and the many, many colors of the rainbows. People think there are only three colors up there in the sky in the rainbow, red, yellow, and blue. And, you know, one day I guess I was sitting there looking at a rainbow, and I realized that there were like hundreds of colors emanating from this rainbow. And that's what I was playing with originally with these whites and these colors next to the whites. Now it is about surface color and surface energy and shape and some vibrations that happen other—in these works now and the newer works that I'm doing, I'm still experimenting. I'm still trying to find out what is going on. But it's also combination of line and color and translucencies and texture of paint, one next to the other, and using the paint and using the brushstroke more, probably going back to what I was doing when I first started painting and I was using oil paint. And I'm not even sure now whether I may—there is a possibility that—well, I'm working in oil paint now just because I don't have any acrylic paint. So it could be that I'm going—you know, the same thing that happens. I don't have any acrylic paint, so I'm using oil paint. I'm actually using this new stuff call alkyd, just because I happened to pick up some tubes in New Haven. I didn't know what it was. I finally found some descriptions of how to use it and what the properties of it are and how it could be used. It's fairly quick drying, as acrylic is, but it's still workable. You can function with it and rework it as oil over a series of days. It doesn't dry immediately. It takes a while to dry. It looks very colorful on there, doesn't it? As opposed to just that white background and surface. And I think I'm probably enjoying the pleasures of all this color it goes through. This is one of my favorite little paintings even though I'm sure people wouldn't understand what in the world it is and where in the world it's coming from.

MASON:: What's the name of it?

JACKSON:: That's a good question. It's right around the corner. It's called Base Blue. It was done in 1984 while I was living in Idyllwild. I have a number of paintings that are my favorites, but I don't think they would be anyone else's favorites. They are pieces that I will probably just keep, because they're just for me, really. Well, all of it's for me, it's just that—and it always is amazing. I think it's always astounding when somebody comes through and they like a painting and they would like to have it. I think that's always surprising. Generally, for an artist, you're just working for yourself pretty much, and you are sort of astounded when somebody wants something. This other little painting called Quietly Carmine is another painting that I really enjoyed, because it is sort of the opposite of what anyone would expect from me, I think. This was shown in some exhibitions. It has a carmine sky. It's mountains, kind of washy. Instead of having a white sky, it's just that red, red sky. There's one other painting that I did in 1968 of a tree shape. I think Dr. Donald Henderson bought that painting, and then he—and it has a red, red sky like that one, almost that same red sky, which is kind of interesting, now that I think about it. He actually bought a number of paintings from me. And then evidently, when he was married his wife didn't like the work or something, or he changed, and I kept getting these calls while I was in Idyllwild from insurance companies and galleries wanting to know what was the value of the work. I thought, well, maybe he's getting insurance value on the work. I found out later that he was completely emptying out all of his work, and I was told he didn't want black art anymore. He just wants to collect mainstream art, because that's what his wife thinks he should do. Which surprised me, because he really loved the paintings that he had. But I was giving information basically thinking that I was helping him, and it was only to give the value to sell the work off. So that's another one of those kinds of things that are really—

MASON:: It makes you cynical.

JACKSON:: Yeah, especially with black artists and people who own black art. It just shouldn't even happen like that, to put a monetary value in that way. It's the reason that [Robert] Rauschenberg was very upset with the Sculls when they auctioned off his works. I love that documentary where he socks the guy. You know, he got drunk enough, and Rauschenberg socked him right there in front of everybody. Because they bought work from him, supposedly because they loved the work, for $900 and here they're selling the work off for millions.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 15, 1992

MASON:: Let's see. Today we were going to talk about your work on the Black Arts Council and the California Arts Council. But before we do that, I have actually two follow-up questions that aren't really related to each other. The first one is, I never asked you how you came up with the name for Gallery 32.

JACKSON:: Oh, the suite in the Granada Building was number 32. And because I knew historically that Alfred Stieglitz had named his gallery, I think it was 291, which was the number of the room, maybe, where the gallery was, I just decided it would be Gallery 32. That was the simplest thing to do. And a lot of people didn't know what that was all about, and some people had no idea what reference it made to Alfred Stieglitz. It's funny your asking me about the work I did on the Black Arts Council. It's really bizarre; I can't remember doing anything except making the gallery available. People would have meetings there and conversations. I think we had a Christmas exhibition. I remember doing kind of a talk in the public schools about art, kind of doing a history of black artists for the kids in school and going to some exhibitions at the museum.

MASON:: At the L.A. [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art]?

JACKSON:: Yes. And I guess, as far as I remember, it seems like I was just another support person there. Maybe other people remember something else, but—I think because we had meetings at the gallery, and we had the Christmas fundraiser, and we just sort of all worked together trying to support black arts. I remember seeing Claude Booker and Cecil Fergerson and Bob Heliton and—what's his name? He passed away a few years ago. There were two guys who passed away at the same time almost, two or three it seemed like. But they were all the security guards and sort of the forces on the Black Arts Council. Everybody just sort of joined together. And I guess I was on the board of directors, maybe.

MASON:: Really? I didn't get the impression that they were that organized to have a board. It just seemed like people did what was needed at the time.

JACKSON:: I think they did have a board, and we just sort of did whatever we had to do. For stationery or something maybe there was a board listed. But the security guards, the guys, were actually the ones who were doing all the running around and organizing. Whenever there was an exhibition of black artists, they were there to do really nice installations. They sort of improved the quality of the way we were putting up art. In the galleries, the art was done very well, because the guys like Dan Concholar would always come through with a ruler and make sure the levels of all the tops of the paintings were really right. He was very good at that. And David was very innovative. David Hammons was very innovative about putting up shows. But when the Black Arts Council guys came along, they helped to put up installations in places that were bizarre—I think like shopping marts and—

MASON:: Banks.

JACKSON:: Yeah, banks, places that really weren't ready to have gallery exhibitions.

MASON:: So it was an attempt to get the art out to where the public was, to bring the art to the public?

JACKSON:: Yeah. So we sort of worked with them. Alonzo [Davis] and my gallery and Samella [Lewis] and, you know, everybody, we all sort of worked with them to try to help get the art out so people could see who the artists were.

MASON:: When you said that David Hammons was more innovative, did you mean in the places that he chose?

JACKSON:: Well, David was really funny, because David would come along—for example, I had an exhibition of his work [David Hammons]—I forgot about the show I had of David's, as well. It's like everybody had shows. But you don't think about listing it right down the line. But David had an exhibition. And of course, David would walk in—I guess if the show was supposed to open at eight o'clock, David might walk in at a quarter to eight or eight fifteen and hang up a new piece that he had just done, a few minutes after he'd just finished it. He'd put it up on the wall, you know, and hang it. Or he'd come in and do a whole installation of something, which was really exciting. So that was the way David was. We never knew what was going to happen with David. He'd just come in at the last minute with this incredible piece, you know something he had just—a process he had just invented right there on the spot. I forgot to mention John Stinson's exhibition [John Stinson] when we were talking about me dancing in the clubs. That was sort of one of the biggest disappointments for me, because the night of John Stinson's exhibition—the brochure for John was a photo of him standing in the doorway of his mail truck. We just thought it was a neat photograph. We had no idea of the implication of what was going to happen with that photograph. It just showed that John, obviously, he was a black man who drove a mail truck, and he was also an artist, and he was having an exhibition. Well, every political person—there was Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, there was David Cunningham, everybody and anybody you could imagine came to the opening of that exhibition. They were lined up. The gallery's on the second level. People were lined up all along the balcony and down into the veranda in the street coming up to the gallery. Well, I had to go work that night, the night of the opening. And I was so disappointed, because I really wanted to be there, and I had to go away. That was the biggest disappointment for me, having to go work on a night that there was actually an opening. That was the only time I ever had to go work on an opening night. And it was really exciting. It was just incredible that all these people were just lined up to come to see this exhibition.

MASON:: Because of—? I don't get the connection between the photograph and the politics.

JACKSON:: It was because he was a mailman. He was a black mailman, and he was also an artist. So what it did was pull in these people, political people, and also just average people who normally wouldn't think to come to see an exhibition.

MASON:: I see.

JACKSON:: And when we did it—we just designed it. It was on a blue stock, kind of cornflower blue stock, and then this sort of muted photograph of him, and it said "U.S. Mail." And we just had no idea. It was a statement that was being made. We knew that it was hip. We thought it was just a really neat photograph and a neat brochure. It was really nicely done. They became much more sophisticated looking from the one that was there, because we kept getting simpler and simpler about what the imagery was.

MASON:: Well, what did they think most black artists were doing? Most black artists were—I mean, you were working at another job, and people were working in the post office.

JACKSON:: Everybody. All the artists were working at some other thing, because a lot of people had families already—you know, the guys did. Or you had to live somehow. And I think it was just people like me and David. Dan didn't work, either. He stayed at home and took care of his children. I think his wife [Olivia Concholar] worked. They made an exchange. He stayed home. He did all the laundry, he cooked for the kids, and he stayed home to paint. Because she wanted to go out and work. She was probably one of the first, one of the earliest feminists. She was a Chicana. She went out and—and that made both of them perfectly happy. So I think the three of us were probably the three artists who didn't really work. I mean, Timothy [Washington], as soon as he graduated from college or from art school, went to work for I think Universal Studios, which was probably his undoing, because he was making too much money too fast.

MASON:: As a set designer?

JACKSON:: Yeah, as a scenic artist and I guess partly set design. They were probably working tech. He was doing a lot of technical buildup, as well. So he had a lot of money really fast. And he was really young. And his wife—he got married right away and then lost some babies, and that was just very upsetting for him and his wife. But all the artists, yeah, were doing different things. It was just somehow because this guy was a mailman, it brought a lot of people in.

MASON:: Where did you get a lot of the money during the time that you were on the Black Arts Council to hang the shows and to transport the work? Do you remember?

JACKSON:: You mean for the Black Arts Council?

MASON:: Yeah. Did most of the money come from the community? Was there any public funding for that?

JACKSON:: No. No. It was coming out of people's pockets. The installations that I'm sure that Cecil and Claude and all of them were using to hang the shows were being borrowed from the museum. I know that when they hung the show at the gallery, my gallery, they had these pretty little museum tacks with blue heads and little gold hangers on them that were—we'd just been using nails, and these were something new. It was an innovation where this thin little nail went through. And I know they left a box of those with me, so I inherited a box of really nice hangers for the gallery. No, it was just stuff that was leftovers that were borrowed from the museum, and then they would take them back. Or for a while there were a bunch of panels that the museum would have thrown out, I guess, or recycled, and they just became the Black Arts Council's panels that went around for each exhibition that got remade into different modules and things. But it came out of people's pockets. I don't remember—when we had the Christmas exhibition, I think that was a fundraiser for the Black Arts Council or for—it was for something. But it seemed like it was something to help in the community, not necessarily for the council. And basically if things sold, then a little percentage went to help out for putting the exhibition up. It was for the expenses—for the brochure, the poster, or whatever. I think even the Black Arts Council poster, somebody probably donated the paper. David Hammons, I think, made a silk screen, and they were silk-screened right there on the spot. There wasn't money, and there wasn't all this fundraising and grant writing. Things came out of people's pockets or out of supplies that we found. We just shared stuff, and we did it. I could be wrong as far as where the money was coming from for the rest of the Black Arts Council, but I'm sure—because I think even some of the guys on the council, almost most of them ended up in divorce because they were taking money out of household budgets and things to do what they were doing, you know, out of their paychecks to work, and trying to get their wives to volunteer and to cook and to help. And it was driving a lot of the wives crazy, because they weren't at home anymore. They were doing this all the time.

MASON:: So when you were on the council, was it the council's vision to—? I know at first what they were trying to do was get big institutions like the L.A. County Museum to open up their doors to black artists, who, after all, were taxpayers, as well. Is that what was happening while you were there? Or was it more, "Forget the museum. Let's just do work in the community."

JACKSON:: Well, there was a lot of conversation and controversy. What they did was, of course, when people would say, "Well, the museum ought to be showing the black artists. Charles White ought to have a show, because Charles White has never had a show in the L.A. County Museum. He's been here in the community for umpteen million years, he teaches in a major art institution, and nobody wants to recognize his art, because they say it isn't mainstream." But then the other conversation from the other point of view that came up was "Yes, we do pay taxes for that museum, but shouldn't we be making our own? If they're not going to be responsive to us, then maybe we ought to be making our own institutions." Or, "How do we get the art out to make people even aware that somebody like Charles White even exists? And the other black artist exist who studied with Charles White?" So there was lots of discussion and controversy and lots of trying to sit down and write a sort of manifesto or theme of what it is that is black art, trying to define what it is. Who are the people out there who participate in it? Who are the people who ought to be informed or educated about what was going on? So I think that educating the public, probably what they call now networking artists, ways to try to get materials to artists—that was always a concern, especially from the artist's point of view. It's like you want us to work, you want us to make art, but we don't have money for supplies. That's always the thing; we don't have money to buy supplies. Or you ask us to do exhibitions, but we can't frame the work nicely in order to put it in an exhibition. You know, how do we prepare this work? Or we just come up with this funky-looking stuff the way we normally do it, and we stick it in a show. That's a lot of what the assemblage art is about. You put this stuff together, and that form is the total piece without frames, without running to, I think it was, Aaron Brothers frames and buying five frames for two dollars or something, really cheapo frames that made the really beautiful work look horrible. It was better not to put a frame on it and just have the work. But I think basically the concept was more about—the artists came to the conclusion that it was more important for black people to know about the artists' work and to stop hanging cheap posters, posters that they actually paid more money for than they would pay for a piece of art. Or they'd go out and buy some art at a white art gallery or an art gallery that only showed white artists and brag about it when they'd pass right by and wouldn't even consider or didn't even know that there were black artists that they could buy from. Anyway, it's funny when you say "on the council." I was thinking it's like the way we sat on the California Arts Council as an entity of people who sat up in front of the whole state of artists was not really the way the Black Arts Council seemed to function. There were some panel discussions I remember, where I think Charles White and some other people, John Riddle, were invited to be on panels, maybe Bernie [Bernard T.] Casey and I might have been on a panel one time, but it was more like a real community of interested people just doing things together and sort of meeting as opposed to—probably the most formal part of it was that group of security guards and people who were doing installations in the museum, because they worked in the museum, and they were the ones who started it. They functioned as a group of people who had an interest initially to just get out and find the artists. They were trying to find artists—"Who are the artists in the community?"—and then supporting and trying to get people to come to the galleries that did exist and to the artists' exhibitions. I mean, they were always there. That's the reason they were hardly ever at home. They were working, and then they would get together to try to organize all these other things that were trying to get people to know that the artists really did exist.

MASON:: Did you think it was pretty inclusive? Or do you feel that there were some artists whose names sort of pop up but then you don't see them anymore? People like Wilbur Haynie, some of the people I mentioned yesterday, who seem to be going off in a different direction, like Fred Eversley?

JACKSON:: Well, there were a number of—at that time, Fred didn't really—I'm trying to think, when did—? Fred was in that exhibition in '68, but he wasn't really—that was the small images exhibition [at California State University, Los Angeles]. He wasn't as well-known a name. I mean, they knew about Fred, but I don't think—because Fred was out in Venice. They knew Fred was out in Venice. There were artists like Joe Ray, who also had that big studio space in the big terminal building on Venice Boulevard that I used to covet as a place for a studio. I didn't know there was another black artist in there in this huge space that was there. There were a number of artists who were scattered around. But basically the artists who were participating were the ones of us who sort of were in—I was in that mid-Wilshire district, and the artists who lived around the Crenshaw [district] and Watts and sort of that area—but there were certain artists who were also being invited to be—other organizations and other groups started paying attention and wanting to have these big black exhibitions. I remember when they had the show at La Jolla [Museum of Art, Dimensions of Black]—and that was later, in the seventies—they asked Ben [Benjamin] Hazard—Fred Eversley may have been in that show. I don't remember. That was a really important exhibition, and I was not in that show. I think maybe Samella may have been. I think Samella and—I forget who else helped to make some choices in that show. And most of the choices that were made were men. I don't remember whether Betye Saar was in the show or not. I think she may have been. But I guess I wasn't being taken seriously as an artist then.

MASON:: Why were most of the choices men—?

JACKSON:: They were kind of establishment people. I don't know. It was a curious thing. That was a curious group of choices that were made for that exhibition. I think—I would love to go back and see that catalog and see who was in it. I don't know if Bernie was in it or not. I think he may have been. I was excluded from a number of exhibitions early on, because I think people didn't like my work, or they didn't take me seriously as an artist, even though I was showing.

MASON:: There was some controversy over whether or not your work was "political" or not.

JACKSON:: It didn't have to do with "political" necessarily with black artists. It was only the [Black] Panthers who asked that kind of question of almost all the artists. It could have been not "black" enough for people or not understanding what it was about, or they just didn't like the work. They didn't think it was good enough, or they just didn't like it. I don't know. But that happens all the time, even now, where people don't like what you do, and you're not included in exhibitions.

MASON:: Why did you say the La Jolla exhibit was important?

JACKSON:: Well, it was a major exhibition in a sense, at that time, anyway. It's like now I'm very skeptical about all these things, about what's important, you know, especially when an institution decides to do something like that. Because basically it's very similar to that Woman's Building situation where they had the The Sapphire Show exhibition, and then the next thing you know is that they run out and they apply for a federal grant, and they get the money based upon the fact that they have included a so-called "people of color" minority, as they want to call it, and then they get their money based upon that, but then you never ever see them again having any kind of association with this other group. And there was this furor that all of a sudden happened where institutions, major museums, or people were deciding to organize huge exhibitions of black art, and that was one of the early ones. I think Bell Telephone [Company] and Carnation Company also came through with representatives and chose art. I wasn't in that one, either. They had a certain look that they wanted in the work. I think just for a long time people couldn't figure out where my work was coming from, where to put me. I wasn't a feminist, my work didn't look like the other black artists' work. And partly they weren't choosing very many women in exhibitions, period. They didn't take a lot of the women's work seriously. And because Betye had been around longer, and she in a sense was—it's like for me there was—you would have someone like Alma Thomas, and then you'd have Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and then maybe the next generation would be Betye Saar. And I'm not saying it's only by age necessarily, but where the artists actually started working and progressing. And then in the next generation of artists coming along, I would probably be in that one. Who else was in my generation? Senga [Ngudi] came along a little later, and Varnette [Honeywood] is the next generation. Senga and Maren Hassinger are a little bit younger than I am, so they were in the next group that sort of came through developing. So in the order of who comes first, which is almost like African tradition, there would be Samella and Betye and Elizabeth Catlett, that whole group of people who—you know, the step first. So you have to wait your order for the time that you get to come in to be represented, when you get to grow a little bit. That's really how it should be in a sense. That's the humble order of things. So at the time there were some of us who were sort of crushed, who we weren't even asked, or we weren't even considered by these people who knew us who were helping to make choices. So I think that was as if they sort of swept through and didn't even tell us about it or didn't even bother to come look at our work to see.

MASON:: You mentioned something in the other tape, and then you just mentioned—well, talking about black women being taken seriously or not being taken seriously. You said that there was kind of a major transition when you had the The Sapphire Show show at the Woman's Building in '73, that the black men came out and started to support the women artists. What was the catalyst for that sudden, abrupt change?

JACKSON:: Well, it wasn't sudden. No, that wasn't a sudden change, in a sense. The men had always been supportive in Los Angeles. We were always shown as a group. So it was the white women who made the separation and had a black women's show. We had always all shown together according to a theme or people getting together according to like work or interest. The only time we separated was when we had The Sapphire Show. And I can't remember whether The Sapphire Show happened before or after The Sapphire Show. It may have happened first, and then the white women decided to do their show. I don't know. But The Sapphire Show came just out of us talking and kind of joking around and comparing how we all got started. It's like Gloria [Bohanon] and Yvonne [Cole Meo] and Senga and Betye and all of us were just sort of sitting around, and then we said, "Well, we ought to just do a women's show of black women, just because we want to do a thing. Because they're always talking about what we do is crafts or just little fiddley work at home or whatever. So why don't we do a show?" So that's what happened. We did do that show, and the men were very supportive. They thought we should do that show.

MASON:: You mentioned before at Otis [Art Institute] you were kind of ignored and you thought it was because you were a black woman.

JACKSON:: Well, I was new, and they didn't know who I was. And it wasn't really ignoring; they were just sort of, all the guys, sitting back quietly looking to see. It's the way most of them are. It's like Alonzo sits back and looks, and David Hammons will sit back and look, Dan [Concholar] looks. Dan tends to be a little more open and friendly just to try to make people welcome. But he's shy, also. I mean, he's not a real aggressive person. But they were just sort of trying to figure out who I was, that's all. Because here I was somebody who had come out of the blue, and I was really new in town. They hadn't seen me around in any of the circles, and I hadn't gone to any of the—whatever was going on before I arrived, I wasn't in that group. And I lived in Echo Park, while everybody else lived down in the black community. I was living on the other side of town with all the Bohemians and in the mixed neighborhood with all those strange people, in the woods! And then I also had shown those—I don't think they made the connection that I was the same person who showed those—and I don't know whether that was before—I just found a notebook that said this was a sketchbook from Charles White's class in July of 1968. I'm not sure whether I took that class. And it was the same summer. It may have been the same summer. And I was still pretty naive. So they may have known it was me when those paintings showed up at that Watts [Summer Festival of Arts] exhibition. But now I look at them and I still have to laugh. It's the most hysterical thing in the whole world. It was just terribly naive. But it's the same naivete that I had when I was sixteen and I put those paintings in the professional exhibition not really knowing the difference. I guess that that's something I've been accused of all my life. I think I'm less naive now than I have been. I think it was David Hammons who said—he and John Riddle and all the bunch of them used to laugh at me and say that I was a gofer, that "Suzanne would go for anything." Yeah. I mean, I had no reason to not believe people. I'd always been raised that basically most of the people I grew up with didn't deceive you. You didn't have any reason to be when it's seventy-four [degrees] below zero outside! [laughs]

MASON:: Do you want to read some of the statements from your journal?

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah.

MASON:: So what are we looking in? This is a journal from—

JACKSON:: This is a journal that basically I think I had started—it says November 1981 in Idyllwild [California]. And what I think I decided to do at one point was just to go through probably some catalogs and books and put down—just to copy down for myself as a progression what the different statements were that I had written down about my work at different periods. Because I guess I was feeling it's sort of important to see what my progress was as far as—it's like you asking me yesterday to describe early works and what I was doing. And probably from what I said yesterday, after reading through some of these statements, may be totally different from what it was that these statements say. This is like 1970. This is from What I Love, which is the first book I published. And the statement, 1970: My art deals with reality versus fantasy, aloneness versus loneliness. What I paint attempts to express conflicts within the mind, conflicts of choices, of loves. Of sensitivity, searching, ordering, freeing oneself toward some continuous cycle of rediscovering who in fact I really might be. That was 1970. And then in 1971—and this was also a poem that was from What I Love. The poem about the Panther rhetoric about art. Do you want me to read that? Or do you want me to skip on? Because that's in the book.

MASON:: Well, when you say the Panther rhetoric, exactly what were they saying?

JACKSON:: Well, maybe I will read part of this. In answer to Panther rhetoric about art: They say in order to relate to the people, in order for the people to understand, it's got to have all the fingers and toes. I say you intimidate the people. You say the people have no minds for dreams, for making some kind of pleasant fantasy within their own realm of wishful need. You say the people have no capacity for filling in or for making new images within their own minds when they look at art. Or at most what you say is that the people should not be allowed to delve into fantasies which might relate to their own reality more than to yours. So in essence I think that probably what was said to me at the time was that I didn't—in Emory Douglas's cartoons for the newspaper, of course, his drawings are very literal. Every finger, every eyeball, everything is there, because they are illustrations, and they are cartoons. So the whole rifle is there with the bits and pieces of what that rifle is. And my work doesn't do that. I'm not interested in putting in every hair and every eyelash or a total imagery in a painting. That's where I think when I say that the process is over and the painting is not mine anymore and it belongs to that person looking at it is. It's for that person to enjoy and to enter into it with their own experience. So that's basically what that was sort of about. And then in 1972 I had a statement that was about walking into a gallery and all the faces were pink, yellow, white, rose, and everyone called the artist sensitive and poetic and in tune with the movements of his environments. And then the next paragraph was about walking into the gallery and viewing the works of an artist whose works commented—and the faces were brown, blue-black, violet. Someone called him insensitive and primitive, called him protest, too political. Someone else called him racist. And that's sort of an essence of that statement. And then—

MASON:: Do you want to pick some that have some significance?

JACKSON:: I think the ones that aren't published. This one that was in 1981 to Big Mama Rag.

MASON:: You should explain what that is.

JACKSON:: Big Mama Rag was one of the early feminist newspapers. They wrote me saying that they wanted to use my art. It was a political newspaper. Basically—and I didn't know it at the time—it was a feminist lesbian newspaper. I think it was Faith Ringgold who wrote to me and asked me to make a contribution. I think that they had probably brought her in as a black representative. Because usually when a lot of the women's movements are trying something new they decide, "Oh, we don't have anybody who is a black person or a Chicano or an Asian. Let's go find somebody and get them to help us so that we can balance this thing out." So they asked me to make a statement and to send some reproductions of my work. And I felt that this was political, because it had to do with who I was and what I really felt at that time. And of course, it was probably considered not feminist. So the statement was: I learned not to be afraid to expose myself through my art. I love nature, animals, children, spirit, love, and myself as a women. If within my work the symbols reflect my culture, my upbringing, my environment, and especially my feminity, that is simply in everything of beauty and value that I want to do. Well, I guess they didn't consider that political enough. And my rereading it, as far as I'm concerned it's about as feminist or womanist as you could possibly be. I'm just saying that I appreciate myself as a woman. And I think that's what I think most women should feel. But that's my point of view. And then this other statement about my work myself. This was sent to Donna Munchin, who was at that time trying to assemble a book on artists. She was living in Pasadena [California]. I don't know whatever happened to this book, or if she thought I was really crazy, too. I'm not sure. I think I wrote this from Idyllwild, both of these maybe from Idyllwild. I think I just read the same thing about Alice Walker; now that she's moved up into the woods everybody thinks that she's become airy-fairy.

MASON:: Wasn't Angela [Y.] Davis living up in the woods someplace, too?

JACKSON:: I don't know. She may be. All three of us are Aquarian, born in the same year, 1944. We were born within I think ten days of each other. So we tend to go off into nature, and then we're very happy, because then we can go off and think and we can write and we can deal with the elements of nature. In this statement, and it is a November 10, 1981, statement: I finally made it to the mountain, ragged mind, empty heart, full heart, half love, full love, trusting only the mountain, knowing it will rumble every now and then. Knowing that the trees will yellow, some of them, and that leaves will fall. Not knowing whether it will rain, whether it will sun, or whether it will snow. Waking in the morning not caring, moving from one day to the next date. This is where I will be, I hope, one with the universe, earth, and sea, all in me. And I think that probably that statement could be taken as being very light and very airy. But what I now read into it is that I left and went to the mountains because I had a number of sort of disheartening and probably life-truth experiences just before I left Los Angeles, that being there for fifteen years just sort of made me realize that everything everybody tells you is not true and that people do connive and scheme. And I was just tired. It's like after a point there's a struggle, and you get tired of the struggle and the struggle. I remember a couple of times that Dan Concholar called me and I was in tears, because I was trying to figure out how I was going to pay the utility bill. And I had my son [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi] and worried about how to feed him. You can do a lot of things and be out there always on the surface for other people, but other people are also struggling and you're on your own when you have to take care of yourself. And you can do a lot for the causes, but then you end up kind of ragged and poor. And it's tiresome. Especially living in the city and having to deal with what the city is and what it represents. I miss right now being able to go out into the woods, to step out my door and know that there are trees and animals out there. All there is out there right now is concrete—you know, something we were talking about last night. For some people, it doesn't bother them. They love the city. I have a hard time not being able to step out and know that something is growing out there. I think those are the last statements that I ever wrote for anything. That was '81. And I don't know what I'd write next. It probably will reflect my experiences from New York City to New Haven [Connecticut] to Los Angeles.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO AUGUST 15, 1992

MASON:: Let's see. I had two other questions that kind of related to the Black Arts Council. One, you mentioned your work on the show Two Centuries of African American Art. I don't know if that was necessarily related to the Black Arts Council.

JACKSON:: Oh, that was later.

MASON:: And then the other question had to do with trying to start a California black arts council with Arthur Monroe. That was more, I guess, a statewide thing?

JACKSON:: Well, when I moved back to San Francisco I somehow connected with Ray Taliafero, who had been the musical director for Fly Blackbird, which was a musical that I danced in and was a choreographer for and did costumes for back in 1964, I think. He had the idea to do a huge Black Expo, is what the name eventually became. And it was everything: film, theater, visual arts. What else was included? Music. To bring together black people in all of these fields from all over the country and to do a big expo at the civic center in San Francisco. Well, I became the arts coordinator for that. I traveled around and met artists, went to the National Black Arts [Festival] conferences and met artists there, and managed to get works from about 179 artists to put in the exhibition. After putting up that exhibition very quickly—because they only gave us a couple of days' time to do it in Brooks Hall—and it was huge. It included cartoonists, Morrie Turner. It included—I found a piece of work by Mary Edmonia Lewis, two pieces, in the basement of a library in San Jose. And works by Sargent Johnson and Henry Tanner.

MASON:: How did you find those works by her?

JACKSON:: I was just doing some research in the library and discovered that—and called some people—Carroll Greene—and started making some connections and discovered that these pieces were in San Jose.

MASON:: But her work isn't recognized. Did you recognize it as an Edmonia Lewis?

JACKSON:: It was known that these two Edmonia Lewises were there. They knew that it was her work. They were two marble pieces.

MASON:: Okay. So you knew about the work and you happened to find them?

JACKSON:: Well, in the process of doing research—because I wanted to do a historical part, not just to do contemporary artists. So in the process of researching who some historical American artists were, it was Mary Edmonia Lewis. And I wanted to find some women, and she was one in particular. And it turned out that she and possibly Henry Tanner had both been here on the West Coast. So I somehow—this has been so long now. I just went to the libraries and started checking around and started trying to get information. I was in Washington, D.C., trying to get information, and I called back in Oberlin [Ohio], where she was from, and somehow traced these two pieces to San Jose. So I was able to get those two pieces. Also getting Elizabeth Catlett to be able to come into the country for that exhibition was kind of a coup, because she had not been allowed to come into the country before that for several years. I remember calling Mexico City and speaking with her. I didn't have any idea why it was that the telephone lines were very distorted. They went through a lot of changes where I could tell that they were not—they were either monitoring the lines or something into Elizabeth Catlett. But I remember this booming voice came over the phone. And I was really kind of nervous talking to her. When I got off the phone I thought, "Gee, she sounds like God," you know, on the phone. Because it was like this deep voice that was resonant and booming and booming. Well, it was the telephone line. Because when I met her, she's got a strong voice, but it wasn't that. So we were able to get Elizabeth Catlett into the country after a lot of finagling and working. And I think I was able to get—I hadn't met E.J. Montgomery yet then, I don't think. But we got her into the country. She was able to go across country as well, maybe for a conference or something. She was able to get back in again from then on. From that time on she was able to come back into the country a couple of times. They lifted the ban on her. So from that exhibition—when that was all over with and finished, because I was doing a lot of traveling for that, Sherry Ayo, who had been the accountant at the [University of California] Berkeley University [Art] Museum, came to me and asked me about doing the research and being the principal researcher for this idea for an exhibition that she wanted to do that would be called Black Masters. And it was about the—it's in my resume, the current title of it, the Inherent Retention of Culture by African Americans—Africans in the United States, in the Americas, in all the Americas. And it meant that crossover and what those Africanisms were that were still inherent in the things that we were doing here. So that meant researching South America. That's how I discovered Surinam. When I went into the library at UC Berkeley and I went into the anthropology section and started looking around and discovered these old books with information, that's when I discovered the Surinam forest and the people who lived there and that whole history of those people who had become free very early on with just rocks and pebbles and persistence in Guyana and Surinam.

MASON:: These were the Maroons?

JACKSON:: And how the Dutch traded—how does that go? I think it was—New York was a Dutch colony and Surinam was a British colony, and the Dutch traded. It was one way or the other. The Dutch or the British traded, because the blacks who were there in Surinam drove them so crazy that they didn't want it, so they switched it for New York City.

MASON:: Oh, I see.

JACKSON:: They switched rule. So I found that quite interesting. And still, I guess to this day they're still pretty tough in those back swamps of Surinam. Nobody gets in there unless they allow it. But I'm understanding that part of that now is becoming very westernized. So that was one research. And then the other was discovering that John James Audubon's mother was a black woman from the West Indies. And as far as I was concerned, that meant that he could be included in the exhibition as well. So his work was in that exhibition—well, in the first exhibition—and then—no, in the research that I did. So he was included in that research. Arid then we went around, Sherry and I. Sherry had been the accountant at UC Berkeley's art museum, so she understood all the workings, and she was watching the process. She handled all the money that came through the museum, so she knew everything that was going on. She was just this little bookkeeper, real quiet, who sat over in the corner. They didn't think she was important; she just handled the books. So when she got this idea, she quit her job at the museum so that we could just travel and do this. We went around getting endorsements from people like Robert Farris Thompson, from—oh, how can I forget his name? The man who was the director of the anthropology museum at Berkeley. Oh, he's very famous. African art collector. [William] Bascom. From Bascom, from Robert Farris, from Samella Lewis, from Arthur Monroe. We just went to all the historians and people who were knowledgeable about what it was we were doing all around the country, including David Driskell. I believe we had an endorsement from him as a principle. Because you had to get all these forms. She knew we had to get the right forms and get these filled out saying I was a principal researcher, she was project director, and this is what we were doing. We were going to present this idea for this exhibition first to the L.A. [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art], then to some other museums. Well, we did present it to the L.A. County Museum. They made all these ovations about how they thought it was a fantastic idea, it was so great, this was so wonderful, and yes we want to do this. But then we have to go through the process—

MASON:: Oh, when you said you presented it to the museum, did you present it to the director? Or one of the councils?

JACKSON:: Do you know, at this point—and I may still have these records somewhere, I don't know. It was to whoever was the right person to do it, because basically we spent a lot of time making sure that we didn't go to the second or third person, that it was always the principal person at an institution that we saw.

MASON:: This is just with the L.A. County Museum. It was all this stuff between the trustees and the directors—

JACKSON:: That's right. This was the director of the museum. And I think at the time—

MASON:: It was probably [Kenneth] Donahue.

JACKSON:: It was Donahue, I believe. Wait a minute. Who was it at that time in the 1970s?

MASON:: Yeah, Donahue was there in the seventies, because Ric [Richard F.] Brown had left before that.

JACKSON:: I believe it was Donahue and maybe Maurice Tuchman. Was Maurice Tuchman involved at all? No. We didn't go to Tuchman, I think, on purpose. It was somebody else who was higher than he. Anyway, evidently they took our proposal and showed it to a committee of people, like Aurelia Brooks, people who had been on the board of the Black Arts Council. And they showed it to, I believe it was the group like Aurelia and Cecil [Fergerson] and people on that board and some other people that they threw in there, some bizarre others. And then somehow they sent half of it one way and another half to somewhere else, like to David Driskell, and asked for those people to write up a new idea, a new proposal, or to give their feedback based upon what we had given them. And then all of a sudden there were funny things—they were going to do it, and they weren't going to do it. And then the next thing that we knew, they had come up with a new exhibition called "Two Thousand Years of Art" with David Driskell as the curator.

MASON:: This was the Two Centuries of African American Art?

JACKSON:: Yeah, Two Centuries of African American Art. And the sad thing was that Sherry came to town, and she didn't even have an invitation to go to the exhibition. I don't know whether she ever saw it. But it was like they literally just stole it right out from under us and changed the name and made it their own. But it did get done, it happened, you know, after we had done all the work and running around just on the initial part of it. And I don't have that catalog anymore. That's one of the catalogs I lost. But it was almost straight down the line everything that we had done, a couple of changes here and there, but not very much. So that's what happened with that. And I think there was a point where people were picketing that exhibition. I think it was. Or there was some protest against that exhibition at one point.

MASON:: That's possible. I think they were all pretty much picketed for one reason or another. But this wasn't one that was held in the basement, though.

JACKSON:: No, it was—

MASON:: Because it was the bicentennial.

JACKSON:: That was the whole point, because we also said we did not want this to be in the basement. This was supposed to be a major exhibition. That was the thing we were forcing and pushing. And because of—that's what they did. They turned it around and held it off for—that was in the mid-seventies that it happened.

MASON:: Yeah, they did it for the bicentennial.

JACKSON:: As a matter of fact, that was our idea too, because that's what Sherry was thinking about. Because there were some other things that people were planning to do for the bicentennial. This was her idea that this should happen for the bicentennial, and it should be a major exhibition—not in anybody's basement but in a major viewing place. I forgot all those things. I don't know whether I still have all those records or not. So I still list that on my resume as research that I did, because it was major research, and it was some major pieces—

MASON:: Just the Audubon and the discovery of the Edmonia Lewis you should definitely get credit for.

JACKSON:: And then there was the punitive expedition of Pitt-Rivers; I had also pulled out a lot of research on that from the museum that hadn't been—what we did was pull out some research that had been there. It had been lying in the museums, in the libraries, for some time. People just weren't using it and weren't paying any attention to it. So I used a great deal of that as the backup material. The Pitt-Rivers punitive expedition against the Benin, where they stole all those Benin treasures and brought them over. And the fact that it was called a "punitive expedition" was just incredible.

MASON:: Yeah, of 1897.

JACKSON:: So a lot of that was the backup research that went along with what we were doing. So all that research and all those examples that we used were basically the things that they sort of pulled together. I mean, they just took it right from what we had done.

MASON:: I guess the next topic is the California Arts Commission/Council, because while you were on the commission—it started in '75 before they disbanded it and it became the council, so—what was your perception of the council before you were asked to join it? Did you ever get any funding from them?

JACKSON:: No. I probably hadn't even heard of the California Arts Council. I was a member of—when I moved back here to San Francisco, to the Bay Area—after working with Ray Taliafero—and I don't know whether it was before or after I was doing this research project—I was asked to be a panel member on the San Francisco [Art Commission] Street Artist Committee. It was a new panel that Mayor [Joseph L.] Alioto was putting together, because all the street artists were sort of just setting up their wares out on the street. So in order to legalize those people and to kind of have a panel to sort of review what the artists were doing to make sure that it was really handcrafted works that were going out on the street and real art and not just things people were buying and sort of throwing together, they set up a panel of artists to sort of review these people and give them a stamp of approval and say, "Okay, you can get your permit, and you can become a street artist. You pay a little fee whatever it is, five dollars or something, and you can set up your booth."

MASON:: So this isn't just muralists, it's all—

JACKSON:: No, this was street artists who make the crafts, those people you see out with their little booths on the street in San Francisco now. So originally—like a lot of what I see out there now is less art-craft style art than a lot of jewelry and stuff that people just do. I see a lot of things now that are quite different, that wouldn't even have been approved when we were on that original little commission.

MASON:: You mean stuff they buy in Taiwan, that's made in Taiwan, and sell?

JACKSON:: Yeah. They are not supposed to do that. Are there people out there now doing that? I'm just saying they are not supposed to do that. It's supposed to be things that they made from whatever they have. Like one guy used to hand carve toys for children, made little trucks and things. Somebody else maybe made little wind chimes, ceramic wind chimes. That kind of stuff that you knew the artist had put their hand on. So that was the first commission I was on up here in Northern California. From there, after being on that panel—one night I guess I had moved back to Los Angeles, in the middle of the blue I got a telephone call from—oh, I remember what happened. I had also been asked while I was still in San Francisco to do a Christmas card for then secretary of state "Jerry" [Edmund G.] Brown [Jr.], so I did a beautiful little bird, a peace bird. I did the drawing for him, and I think—I don't remember whether—I don't think they paid me. But it was kind of a bone of contention where eventually I got one card back from Jerry Brown. I got my drawing back, but he never offered to buy it or to give me any compensation for it. It was like "thank you very much" on this little card, which was very nice, on the Christmas card he sent me, right?

MASON:: I'm sure you enjoyed the publicity, but—

JACKSON:: Anyway, so one night in the mid-seventies, when I was living in Los Angeles, I got a telephone call saying, "This is Jerry Brown. We have decided that we want you to be on this California Arts Commission." And maybe it was from Jacques Barzaghi. "We want you to be on the California Arts Commission." And I said, "Well, what is that? What is this all about? No, I don't want to do this. I don't do that kind of stuff." And then finally they called back, and they called back again.

MASON:: Why didn't you want to do it, though, initially?

JACKSON:: I just wanted to paint. I'm not interested in being on any more councils and things like that. And they mentioned some of the other people that they were asking, but it was still kind of on the q.t. They didn't want to say who. And what it was was that this was still the transition where Jerry Brown hadn't really been appointed. He'd been voted in as governor but he hadn't been inaugurated yet. January was the inauguration. And there was still the old [Ronald W.] Reagan art commission with a lot of Republicans on it, people like Caroline Ahmanson and Mr. [John] Huntington and Mrs. [Nancy Morse Banning] Call from Sav-On Drug [Stores]. It was like really very wealthy people who were on this art commission. They still sponsored just the ballet and just the opera and the symphony orchestra, because that was what they knew. So Jerry Brown appointed—evidently Brock Peters was on that old commission. He was probably the only Democrat on that old commission, the only liberal person, and the only artist on that. But nobody really thought of him as an artist, even though as an actor he was an artist. So Allauddin Mathieu, who was a composer-musician—he was the director of the Sufi Choir then—and Gary Snyder, who was a poet-writer, and me, the three of us were all appointed to that council in the interim.

MASON:: Now, who was Jacques Barzaghi?

JACKSON:: Jacques Barzaghi was an adviser to Jerry Brown. That question was always asked. "Who was Jacques Barzaghi, and where does he come from?"

MASON:: So he wasn't on the council?

JACKSON:: Yeah, he was an adviser. And I don't remember how he qualified for anything except that maybe he had been a Buddhist and—he was French.

MASON:: I read somewhere he was in film. He had worked in French films, right?

JACKSON:: I think he had worked in French film. That's where he came from. I forgot all this stuff for now, it's been so long. So he was kind of a bald headed character that they accused Jacques and Jerry of being lovers. And he had a family and children and all that. He was just Jacques Barzaghi. Anyway, it was Jacques Barzaghi and Elliot Pinkney, who was sort of in politics in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he was little bit questionable, you know, as far as people thought about Elliot Pinkney as a black man. Because Elliot Pinkney—oh, I remember what it was. When they came to ask me to do this commission for Jerry Brown on the Christmas card, Jacques Barzaghi came to my house, but he brought Elliot Pinkney along, as if he couldn't come to see me without having this black man, right—and this questionable black man on top of everything. So that was how Elliot Pinkney got involved in that. But later on, when they called—I must have finally said, "Okay, yes, I'll do it." And we went to the first arts council meeting. Then it was arts commission; it was not an arts council. Eventually we kind of watched and saw them fumbling through, and all the grants that they were giving were to the ballet this, the symphony, and all the organizations of the people who were getting money were white groups. And no Asian seemed to be represented, or if there were any groups of color it was like one out of fifty or something. And they also knew the same kinds of arts groups from only certain areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, maybe. A lot of communities were totally neglected. So they had a vast amount of money. We sort of interjected, you know, like, "Well, it seems like there's a diverse community that maybe is being missed, or it's something else, or some other ways need to happen in this grant process." I mean these people were all very nice people, and they really thought they were doing their job the way they should do it, but what they were doing was not terribly innovative. They were just doing the same old process of giving money. They were very exciting people. One person I grew to respect was Caroline Ahmanson. It turns out that she was the woman that, when I was younger, I used to listen to every morning on the Breakfast Club with Art Linkletter. She was Miss America. She was Caroline Leonetti. She had started her own businesses with a fashion design school, and then she somehow met Mr. [William H.] Ahmanson, married one of the wealthiest men in the country. But she's a very smart woman, very bright and also very flexible. Most of these people were very flexible and willing to have some new ideas just because—I think they were even bored with the process they were involved in. Because they knew they were coming down as an establishment. So one of the first projects that they sort of gave us—I think they must have had something like $30,000 left. Whatever it was, they split it amongst the four of us as artists—amongst Brock in theater and film, me as a visual artist, Allauddin in music, and Gary as a writer. We all sort of put this plan together that we would each go out and find a group or organization that was in need of money. And maybe it was a small amount like $5,000 each or something. They must have had $35,000, I guess. How do you split five times four? It was $20,000, I guess, and then there must have been another $5,000 or $10,000 to administer the money or something, however that works. So they gave us each a certain amount of money that we could go out and spend by finding a group. I found a group through Arthur [Monroe]. There was a house in San Francisco. It was a house where Carith Reid had young girls who lived there, and they had projects that they did. I can't remember the name of the house. But they were given the grant. Brock went out and found the Young Saints in Watts. Allauddin found a musical group that could use some money. And I forget who Gary Snyder found. Maybe it was one man who could work with some younger people as a master teacher. So those four groups were the first sort of innovative grants that were given out under the old commission. And then Jerry Brown had a breakfast, which I didn't go to. That was the first spot on my chart. Because I didn't want to go to a political breakfast and have eggs or whatever it was that we were supposed to have, scrambled eggs. Because Jerry had simplified everything and "say your prayers." Anyway, I didn't go to that. Because I think I was busy doing something as well at that time. So I didn't go to Jerry's inaugural breakfast. Then I went to the first arts council meeting. And the other people he appointed—

MASON:: You mean the new arts council?

JACKSON:: The new arts commission, and then it became arts council. And at that time, I think Alexander MacKendrick was appointed. He was the director who directed the film The Man in the White Suit.

MASON:: Was Noah Purifoy there?

JACKSON:: I'm trying to remember if Noah was one of the first people who was appointed at that time. It's like gradually people were added on. I think he was. And Ruth Asawa, Luis Valdez, Karney Hodge, who was a businessman from Fresno—he was an Armenian businessman who kind of kept the Republican balance in there a little bit. I don't know if he was a Republican, but he was conservative, because he was a businessman. So that balanced that part off. And then—

MASON:: Did Brock Peters stay?

JACKSON:: Yeah, Brock was still there on that council. Peter Coyote joined later, and he had been with the San Francisco "diggers," which was the hippie group. It was actually a yippie group of people who used to go out and get food and clothes together to give to people. Who else was on the council then?

MASON:: When did Gloriamalia Flores come in?

JACKSON:: Gloria came in well into the process, like halfway through, as an assistant, as a staff person. Is she the head of the council or the director now?

MASON:: I don't know what she is.

JACKSON:: I ran into her in '89 when I was working at El Teatro Campesino doing costume design. Because she is married to a man named Perez who is a state representative or something like that. And Juan Carrillo came in as an assistant on the staff. I think now he's the executive director, maybe, and Gloria is—I forget. The two of them now are in high positions on the council, which is kind of interesting. Because they kind of grew up as staff members and sort of worked their way through not really knowing what the council was like. The process of being on that California Arts Council was absolutely incredible. And when you consider the names of people who were on that council, the artists—everybody wanted to know who we were. No one had ever heard of any of us. Of course, Gary Snyder received the Pulitzer Prize almost immediately for Turtle Island. Ruth Asawa had done sculptures all over the Bay Area; people sort of knew who she was. In a way, unofficially, I represented dance, even though I hadn't danced in years. Dancers were very unhappy, but at least that made a voice. And we did start a dance program. Then later I think Bella Lewitzky may have been on the council. But it was the most exciting four years with a lot of critical thought, a lot of analytical thought, working with artists from all over the state, artists participating. That's when I became friends with Arnold Schiffrin and Joan Carl. But they were people who had been working with the California Confederation of the Arts, and they were not happy with the California Confederation of the Arts. It seemed like this sort of right-wing, very conservative institution that really wanted to kind of overpower and umbrella the artists. It was a viable institution as an umbrella for handling funds, but then the artists weren't totally happy with the people who were sort of running it. So there were a lot of fights back and forth between that institution and the council. People were fighting the council in the beginning. A lot of artists were fighting the council. And we were trying to—what they make you do is throw everything out when you go into the new council. All the old books and everything get thrown out, and you reinvent the wheel.

MASON:: So none of the people from the old commission—well, you said Brock Peters stayed.

JACKSON:: Well, there was only Brock.

MASON:: So was he a person to kind of help make a transition?

JACKSON:: In some ways, in some ways. And then we also, as three people having been on the original commission, were a transition. That was the reason that Jerry Brown appointed us to the early commission and let it sort of live for a little bit, so we could see the workings of the whole thing. But that didn't mean anything, because when the new executive director comes in and the people who have to run the office and staff—or the old staff is still there, and they have to be in transition, and you have to get them out or recycle or keep them. And if people have been working for an old administration, they want to do it the way they have been doing it all along. But what we had to do was find out how the state works. We had to start from scratch. We didn't know anything. And this is what happens every time they appoint a new council. When we left they threw out everything that we did, even though we had some innovative programs in the prisons and social work and education. Everybody was involved. We had also divided up the state into bio-regions as opposed to just being Northern California, Southern California, Central. We divided it according to bio-regions in order to make the population really diverse. So grants were given out according to region, which meant it was more equitable according to—the money was divided according to the population and the regions and the organizations. Well, when I went back to an arts council meeting in the mid-eighties, Noah was still sitting there. I was wondering why he was still sitting there. He was trying to hold something together, I thought, from what we had before. They were reinventing the wheel. They had started all over from the beginning, and they were fumbling around. It was the most heartbreaking thing to see that all the work that we had put into it, all the divorces, all the leaving families, all the wild telephone calls that we would get in the middle of the night, had gone to nothing.

MASON:: So you feel that that's just a function of politics? If there is a Republican governor he will do it one way? Or if there is a Democratic governor he'll do it another way?

JACKSON:: Each political set comes in and they just throw away everything that's there.

MASON:: I mean, there must be some kind of structure or grant-making decisions or something, some kind of underlying structure that could be made permanent.

JACKSON:: Well, but it's up to the council. Each council that comes through makes a decision about how they want to do things. That old panel situation that—what we also did was open up the panels so they were more diverse and that the artist participated on the panels. More people. That sort of process of panels making decisions about the grants kind of is there in every group, because that's the easy way that it has been done. But there are some innovative ways to do some of those panels that we had introduced. But these people—it's like each time a council or a commission comes through they throw out everything that has been done before and start something new and do it their own way, so they reinvent the wheel.

MASON:: I guess I was just trying to understand the structure. When you were there, the governor would appoint the director, and the director would appoint the other council members who were the staff?

JACKSON:: No. No, no. The appointments on the council were at the discretion of the governor as a result of recommendations that would come to him either through—I don't remember whether the council members were allowed to make nominations or other people made nominations. But the director was hired by the arts council. And there was this one point where this man from out of state was hired, and he had to be approved by the senate and all that stuff. And he turned out to be a real disaster, you know, moving his family out and everything. He just did not have a real sense of what California was about. This is a real tricky state.

MASON:: He had been with the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts].

JACKSON:: What was his name?

MASON:: Mitze.

JACKSON:: Mitze. Clark Mitze. Clark turned out to be a real disaster. He was a nice white man, for being a nice white man, but he didn't know front from back. I'm sorry. We had had big arguments about hiring him. We weren't totally happy, because we didn't feel like the people that we were given as choices—we weren't given enough choices, and some of the choices that we wanted were a "no" as far as being approved. I forget who had to approve. The senate or somebody higher than us had to make this final approval of who these people had to be and also for the qualifications that they came with. Well, Clark just didn't know California. And also the vastness of this state—on the East Coast you've got about twelve states in the distance of what California is. And you have diverse populations in this state. That was the thing our council emphasized. There are Indian people, there are white people who live in Northern California, there are white people who live in Southern California, there are brown people, black people, Asian people, Filipino people. There are so many cultures and so many different lifestyles in this state, and you must know that if you're going to work here or if you're going to make relationships to what's going on. You cannot come in with the kind of—at least in our council—slickly, East Coast, "I am going to run the game and do these kind of bureaucratic things" and the "This is the way I'm used to doing it out of the briefcase" number. It just didn't work here.

MASON:: Did he just leave voluntarily?

JACKSON:: I think we finally had to ask him to resign. He wasn't too happy about it, because he had to move his family in. But I think we paid for it, because that was a part of the deal which we didn't especially like. But he just wasn't able to function with—and I think it was also because he may have had a heart condition, as well. He was too midwestern conservative for what this state is about. I've found it every time, that when someone comes from out of state to California or from the East Coast, it's real hard for them to grasp what the state is immediately. You've got to be here for a while and really learn—I mean, each one of these cities that we have been talking about, each city, you've got to be here for a while to get to know the intricacies of how it operates before you can even relax and have any enjoyment of what each area is about, let alone getting to know the people, which is not easy. Every time somebody brings up the arts council to me I feel very similar to the way Noah does. I think Noah was there too long. I can't even imagine why Noah was there all those extra years. He had something I think he wanted to do. But I don't think that those people were intelligent enough to do it, the next group that came through. And that's not to slight some other people. I know that Bella Lewitzky was on that council, and I have a great deal of respect for her. And I think that when I left Jane Fonda was put in my place. But Jane Fonda was too busy, even though she had a secretary to do work for her. She was just too busy and overwhelmed to even deal with the council.

MASON:: Oh, I didn't even think she could be appointed. I thought what happened was she was nominated, and the legislature got all up in arms and went to the press.

JACKSON:: Yeah, she did. She was there functioning for a while, but it wasn't very long.

MASON:: Yeah, she did. Yeah, that's true.

JACKSON:: Yeah. I forgot that whole process that they had to sort of approve each one of us and all that.

MASON:: So who picked the panelists, then?

JACKSON:: Well, the panelists were—there was a process that we worked out. And I forget how that happened. I think the panelists were nominated by the arts community at large. Their names were like put on this huge list that was put on a rotation system, and then they might be chosen according to their fields for the different panels. And they were chosen by region, so that many people were actually participating on panels within the regions, and then the regional decisions were sent up to a larger panel or a final panel to fine tune the last choices, and then those choices were finally given to the arts council. And the arts council members had to read the grant, because there were times when we were reading two [hundred] and three hundred grants at a time. I mean, it was incredible. When I moved from my house at Hobart [Boulevard]—the house was the kind of a house that had all these shelves and closets in the hallway that closed up, and you didn't really see what was behind them. And when I got ready to move—and they had drawers that pulled out. And there were hidden closets under stairways. I started pulling out papers of grants that I was keeping because I didn't want to get rid of them. I wanted to keep them, because I always wanted to go back to refer. And at that time I was very sharp. I knew every grant proposal that I had read. I knew every program. We were very sharp people at that point. When I started pulling out that paper, I literally had garbage cans, those tall garbage cans, full of grant proposals from the four years that I was there on the council. And I hated to throw it all away. But what could we do? I couldn't lug that stuff around. As it is, I got into a lot of trouble with lugging around huge amounts of paintings and canvases and That's how I lost everything, art supplies and furniture. That's now can't carry all that stuff around all the because you just can't carry all time.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 15, 1992

MASON:: I guess they were probably big grants, too. Pages and pages of detail.

JACKSON:: Some were little ones.

MASON:: So you had a pretty flexible procedure?

JACKSON:: We had a procedure where we first of all had to make it easy for the people who had to read all these proposals. When you've got a hundred proposals—and that is the reason we sort of separated the system so that there would be regional panels, and then there would be statewide panels, and then the final proposals would go to the council, because there was just a lot of work for a few people to have to do. And we felt that people within the regions knew what kind of work, the quality of work, people were doing within an area. We also had the power—for example, if somebody knew that somebody was cheating or somebody wasn't doing what they were supposed to do, then it could be said. Or if they felt one group really had been struggling, they were doing good quality work and they hadn't received any money, then at least they could get some kind of help. But we also didn't want to just give people band-aid help, where you give somebody help and it keeps them from folding for six months, but they're gone before—the other problem that we had on the council was to devise a system where—the way it works for the state, they'll give you money, but you've got to spend the money first, and then you turn in your receipts. Well, you don't ask for a grant if you've got money.

MASON:: Oh, you're talking about reimbursing the people.

JACKSON:: Yeah. Artists have to come up and spend, or artist organizations have got to spend the money before the state will release the money to them. So you've got to go out and spend the money and have the receipts and then return the receipts before they'll give you the money back.

MASON:: So that means only the people like the symphony and the really well-established organizations could only possibly do that.

JACKSON:: They could go out and fundraise and match their money. So we devised different types of grants, like matching grants that we had. But we did try to work on a system where people could actually get the money first, that the staff could process it in such a way—there was a legal way. There were certain grants that could be only for equipment, or there were certain ones that could be only for programs, or certain ones that were only community-based organizations. But I know it was really—I worked on a program later where the money was so fouled up and the organization became so mired in robbing Peter to pay Paul it became—I could see where the pitfalls were, where some really illegal things were happening, and artists weren't being paid on time or at all. And then there was all this juggling with the council. And it's a bad situation with art. That's why this whole thing with grant process and people depending on grant money in order to function is really not a good thing. If you can't function as a self-sufficient entity after—grant money helps as seed money, but if you have to continue every year, year after year, to pay your people and function because you're getting grants and waiting on grants and writing grant proposals—early this year I wanted to apply in theater for a fellowship to work with different directors around the different theaters in the country. It would pay $1,500 a month. And you really only have six months of the year that you work on this, and the other six months you could go out and get other jobs or initiate your own projects. I had the worst time. First of all, I was trying to use somebody else's brand-new typewriter. It's not the kind where you just pluck the keys? you had to get everything situated and lined up just to figure out how to work the typewriter. And really being busy and trying to put in my ideas in little boxes, I just could not do it. And I guess that's the reason I never received any grants? I could not fill in the boxes. It becomes a kind of programmed answer and fill in the blanks that I think organizations get into. And I know that when I was working on the council and also when I was working on the Brockman [Gallery] CETA [Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] project part of my job was to help Alonzo [Davis] write the grants. Well, I think that we wrote some fairly intelligent grants. But there is a language that goes in that writing which at that time I'd become very good at. We could sit down, Alonzo and I, and write these grant proposals, or at least write up these project descriptions. I think basically that's what I was pretty good at was writing project descriptions, because I was very clear about what the job was supposed to be or writing the job descriptions. But my brain hasn't functioned that way since the 1980s. I couldn't even begin to do that now, because there's a language that goes with it, and I find the language unbecoming. That's the only way I can say it at this point. It's not something that I could really participate in, I don't think. Now there have popped up all these people who are kind of art administrators. It used to be artists who did these things, because nobody else was interested. Now out of this there is a whole group of art administrators who sort of have pocket computers, and they do all of this. It's a whole group, sort of a yuppie group of people who kind of came through. I went to the California Conference of Artists over here in Oakland when I was living in the Bay Area in '85 or '86, and I couldn't believe it; I didn't know anybody there. Nobody I recognized. There were no artists. There were very few artists. It was all sort of bureaucratic people. And there was that period during the eighties especially that began to make this disgust for a lot of us as artists, that all these bureaucrats and administrators were making big salaries but there was no money for the artists. The studio spaces and the supplies were going up. The artists, there was just nothing available to us. And people making big salaries who don't even know the history of what it was or how they got there, how their jobs even evolved, and couldn't care less.

MASON:: Was that something you tried to address when you were on the council?

JACKSON:: No, because while we were on the council that didn't exist yet. There were still artists fighting as advocates for the arts, people like Arnold Schiffrin and Joan Carl. They were the people who really, even to the artists council, asked some really strong questions about, "How are you going to solve this problem? What do we do about this problem? How do we go about doing this?" And who kept us in line and didn't let us stray off the path of what we were supposed to be about, which was about the artists and the kind of programs that would be there for the artists. But it was a lot of hard work and a lot of time spent. I find that it was incredible that for four years people could actually—we were together almost every day in that period of time. We became kind of a family of people who exchanged some incredible ideas and thoughts and really worked together as a unit. It was an incredible group of people to be put together by [Edmund G.] "Jerry" Brown [Jr.].

MASON:: So you don't feel like there was anybody who was kind of trying to take over and lead the whole council in one direction?

JACKSON:: Oh, sure. [laughs] There was Peter Coyote. But Peter became the chairperson, and I was of course the vice-chair. I mean, women are always the vice-chair. Peter was very strong. And Peter's sincerity—we had to try to keep Peter on the track sometimes because he'd go back to being Peter—

MASON:: Cohon. [laughs]

JACKSON:: Cohon, Wall Street. You know, Peter learned to sort of manipulate with the legislators a bit sometimes. But, you know, we had to kind of keep Peter on track. But as a leader he was a very strong leader. And he was the one who really wanted to be chairperson, and you let that person be the chairperson who really wants to be it. But I would sometimes sit there poking him in the side saying, "What about this?" You know, "Peter, remember such and such a thing?" Which is what the vice-chair does. So we all kind of kept each other in line pretty much. We did work as a council. I loved Ruth Asawa. I think I mentioned the other day, there are a number of women that I realized that I had—if anybody asked me who did I have admiration for, and I think on the whole council there were two people whom I felt maintained their integrity without being compromised ever, and one in particular was Ruth Asawa. Ruth was always very quiet. Whenever Ruth opened her mouth, she had something to say, and everybody listened. Ruth was also an Aquarian. And then Gary Snyder. I respected Gary. Gary maintained himself at Kitkitdizzy up in the mountains without a telephone. He'd have to drive miles to get to a phone. He maintained his lifestyle and himself as a writer. And I didn't feel that Gary ever tried to play politics or to use the council to his advantage. So I left having really a great deal of respect for those two people especially. We all change as a result of what we do, so we grow and we become affected by experiences. But I felt that both of them left the council with a kind of clean spirit that they came into the council with. Not as tainted. You know, tainted! We all were tainted and dragged out and tired, but not tainted in any ways I think really affected—the council drained us of our art. It was almost impossible to work as artists while we were on the council. We had no privacy. Our telephones were public access. Even if we installed a private telephone, somehow that information would get out and people could call us at any time. You have no privacy. Allauddin [Mathieu], there was a fire raging near where he lived, and the phone rang. He was trying to get his family out of the house because the fire was coming over the hill, and this artist was on the phone wrangling at him about the grant process and about how he needed a grant. And Allauddin was trying to say, "There's a fire coming over the hill. I'm trying to get my family out of the house so that they won't be burned up!" And this artist just kept on and on and on at him, not even listening or caring that they could have been burned up in their house. So that was the kind of thing that we had to deal with. What's his name? [Ernest] Fleischmann from the L.A. [Los Angeles] Philharmonic [Association] jumped on me and said, "You never come, and you don't participate, and I've never seen you at the Philharmonic." And I said, "Well, first of all, I can't afford to go to the L.A. Philharmonic, and I'm not trying to ignore you." I mean, he called me several times at home, and he got very upset with me because I didn't return his calls immediately. I had to feed my son [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi]. I had to do some family things. Eventually we did get together, and we came to an understanding once we finally got to talk. But people expected that we would just drop everything that we had to do, that our personal lives no longer existed, and that we had to succumb to their will. Now, the thing that was exciting later on was when Arthur Monroe did decide to try to get the black artists together to start a [California] black arts council. A lot of these things overlapped.

MASON:: Yeah. The way we're talking about it is kind of compartmentalized. It's sort of artificial.

JACKSON:: Yeah. But they all sort of overlapped with each other. At the time I had been taken out to the Huntington artist colony in Pacific Palisades. It was this beautiful piece of land where there had been a colony of artists, musicians, writers, painters, and a little farm in the middle, so the colony was self-sustaining. And it had been abandoned since—oh, I don't remember when, maybe the early sixties or late fifties. And all these little studios and houses were sitting there. I'd taken Arthur out there, because we thought—we wanted to just have a place where black artists could go and live there and work and write and paint, as opposed to just being in the city, and in solitude as MacDowell [Colony] and all those other colonies are. But also kind of a working farm where people could also work in ecology and land and all that. Well, we were working on it, and some of the people in the council and other people thought it was a great idea. We were working with Joseph Young and Arnold Schiffrin.

MASON:: Was Leonard Simon a part of it?

JACKSON:: Leonard Simon—oh, Leonard at that time had been working on the council as an executive assistant director or something. He came into the council at one point. And the strange thing that happened was that when we went out to look at the place, when I was taking Arthur out and Victor Heady, our friend, we got out there, and the Santa Ana winds had come through and the fire that sweeps around and sweeps into Los Angeles, whatever those winds are.

MASON:: The Santa Anas.

JACKSON:: The Santa Ana winds had come through, and the fire had destroyed the whole place. It had been sitting empty for about twenty years. And it seemed like the strangest thing, just as we wanted to do this. But Arthur went on anyway and formed this [Black Arts] Conference and put together a conference that was held at Exposition Park in Los Angeles. He did a lot of work in organizing and putting it together. Because Arthur had also been the western regional coordinator for FESTAC [World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture], which went to—

MASON:: This was in Nigeria?

JACKSON:: Yeah, to Nigeria. So he had coordinated—and all of this sort of overlaps also with Sherry Ayo and I doing the research for—

MASON:: The Black Masters.

JACKSON:: The Black Masters show. These things were all overlapping. They were doing the bicentennial celebration. All this stuff was happening at the same time and overlapping. And this was before I was appointed to the California Arts Council. So then all of us were working on these individual projects on our own, in between, and communicating together. Arthur had been doing research on slaves in this country and African relationships and all of that, so he put together the Black Arts Conference. It was very successful. People were there from all over the state. Then, when it came down to the final sessions and putting together all the information that had been gathered at the conference, people got kind of lazy. And in a way what happened at the time—he and I were like mother and daddy—you know, black art mother and daddy or something—and then our relationship sort of split, too, in a way. It was as if people wanted—a lot of the black artists want leaders. They don't want to be leaders but—and it's not just black artists either. People just want to follow like sheep. They want someone to tell them what to do as opposed to taking initiative. And we lose a lot of leaders because people just get burned out. And people wait for certain people to do everything. I think we've lost some of us as initiators because our whole lives get burned out. You get burned out financially. You realize that you haven't paid your rent or you can't pay your rent. You can't buy food, you can't take care of your children. You've exhausted your life for these projects that are for everybody's greater good. But then when the time comes that you really need some assistance to keep this thing going and you need people to just sit down and really participate in the planning of it, they are not there, or they don't want to take the time. They don't mind going to a conference and having fun and all that and having the big discussions, but then when it gets down to really writing the manifestos, putting down the proposals and propositions, and then taking it forward, "How are we going to go about doing this thing?" people poop out. They just back out and don't want to do it. I was thinking last night, because I blocked it out of my memory—I think there was a point at Gallery 32 where I may have even—or maybe Ruth Waddy suggested it. That somehow people should come to the aid of the gallery financially. Because when I realized it basically financially was coming out of my pocket—and there were times that we really did turn over when the artists would sell work, but it didn't always happen. And that was part of my having to go out and dance in a nightclub with no clothes on just to keep the gallery doors open. If I had been living on my own, that's probably not something I would have done. But it was enough money to keep the doors open. But when the time came to ask for a patron or some assistance, there was nobody available who wanted to do that. Even though two people, as I mentioned, put their money in our bank account just to keep it going. Although it wasn't my money, it was their money. And that looked like a good thing, but it wasn't a good thing at the time. But they weren't people from the black community; they were just some white people hiding their money in the gallery account, which seemed okay at the time. I think that a lot of some of the bitterness that Arthur has had is from the times that he worked very hard, and also having built up the African American museum on the CETA project as resident artist-curator.

MASON:: The one in Oakland?

JACKSON:: The [African American] Historical [and Cultural] Society in San Francisco on McAllister Street, now at Fort Mason.

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: And then people not recognizing the amount of work and what was done and what the potential is for what we have—as black people we don't care for our history, and we lose it. So all the research and all the care that was done to sort of put things in order and define them, it's okay to do that, but then people have their other priorities, which is to have cars and things and live another kind of a lifestyle. And that's important first to them as opposed to sort of maintaining our history and maintaining the artists, even. The same thing I said to Cecil [Fergerson] on the telephone the other day, you know, it seems to me the initial thing that we were asking for years ago was, how do the artists get support? What Arthur was trying to do and what we were trying to put together for artists to go to work is a support system, where if you have a tiny apartment in the city, and you don't have room to work, or you have stress and work obligations and family obligations, and you don't have maybe a month or so to go work or a couple of weeks just to have some time—a lot of black artists don't have that. Not many of us get into MacDowell Colony. I notice the list is a little longer with some black artists, but it's still very small—at the MacDowells and the Yaddo [estate]s and places like that. Because of what they're looking for on their panels of conceptual pieces and the kind of art that represents the mainstream, many artists of color don't have those opportunities to go in and just work quietly. My feeling quite often whenever I had studio space was, "Well, I've got my studio now. I don't want to apply. What's the point of my going off to someplace when I can just work here?" But the times that I haven't had a place to work and I really needed to be able to do that, you know, it would have been really good. I know Alonzo found a place up in the mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, that seemed to be very open, but artists don't get that information. So there still needs to be a support system. I'm almost anti all these institutions and museums and galleries and garbage that we keep dealing with. I think that the artist would better be served if somewhere there was some kind of fund for artists to aid them in buying materials and to have time—it seems that when you have time you don't have the money to buy materials, and when you have the money you don't have the time or the place to be able to work. To me those are the more important things, for artists to be able to really develop what it is they're doing as opposed to having to commercialize themselves and get out there and sell art in order to be able to paint or to sculpt. And when you get yourself into a situation of you're having to deal your art and you're having to—now the new thing is to do these fancy-smancy resumes that are all glitzy, that are sent out like press packets. Every artist seems to be doing it. And I'm sorry, I refuse to do it. I can't get into that corporate kind of sales image of what it is I'm about. It's not what I'm about. I was told while I was in Los Angeles early this year that my thinking about my painting is antiquated and it's not—I'm behind the times, because I refuse to sell, sell, sell. I don't want to go out and run around to all the parties and hang out with all the gallery owners. I mean, that's unheard of. I went to this one woman who was dealing her husband's work, would have parties all the time at her house, and all these gallery people would show up there, and a few artists would stray in. And I said to my friend, artists and dealers never hung out. The dealers would always go out together and have dinner parties. Maybe if a dealer came to an artist's studio, it was your own dealer who came to the studio for a dinner party or something, because by then you had become friends or whatever, or maybe you wanted to talk, or maybe that dealer was bringing a collector to your studio. But you did not overexpose yourself in a way—it's like I tended to be probably more outgoing and too friendly even in my early life. But that was just the way I became as a result of living in Los Angeles and being happy not to be so shy anymore and being excited about participating in the process that it was at that time, which I think for that time maybe was valid. But I see that a lot of ills have come out of that, out of all the stuff we've been talking about. It's like progressively it's made what we had in the eighties, which is this commercialism of the art, and students coming out by the thousands thinking that they're artists and they're not and expecting that they're going to make a living as artists, that they should go into a studio and paint it up shiny white and make it so that it's comfortable for the collector to come in and exist in their spaces. I wanted to throw up the whole time I was in Los Angeles early this year looking for studio spaces, where all the studio spaces were like condominiums because they had to be safe for the collectors to come. They had to be clean and nice and neat so the collector could come in and be comfortable in your studio. That wasn't the way. A collector came into your space, if you let them, and they dug through your drawings, if that was the case, and they looked at your paintings in your environment. It wasn't supposed to be making your place nice for the masses of money to come to be comfortable to choose your art. It's not about the art anymore. So I just think there are some of us who probably work alone and quietly and work on our painting because we have to work on our painting. And I don't care if anybody ever sees me again at this point or hears of me, because I'm not going to participate in this process that's going on.

MASON:: Well, we can end on a kind of a up note.

JACKSON:: I guess I got nasty there for a moment, [laughs] But that's what happening now.

MASON:: You talked about a lot of the problems with the funding and the council and things, but there must have been some projects that you were happy about funding, and probably some projects that still exist today that have circumvented the art market even today,

JACKSON:: Well, I think there was a period where I was realizing—when I came back from living in Idyllwild [California] and I came back to San Francisco, and I realized that there were some—I had an exhibition at—what is the name of that gallery?

MASON:: You talked about [Mitzi] Landau Gallery.

JACKSON:: No, that was a farce. That whole thing was ridiculous. That's Alitash Kebede. That woman doesn't know what she's doing, and I'll put that on tape. Her first piece she bought from me, and a second piece, and then from there she decided she was an art expert. And I shudder to think. But anyway, that was the gallery here—Sargent Johnson Gallery here in San Francisco, in the cultural center, the Western Addition Cultural Center. That [Suzanne Jackson] was one of the best exhibitions I actually have had, to tell you the truth. It was a culmination of works that were already in existence that were put together in a nice space very well.

MASON:: Who was the head there? The curator?

JACKSON:: An artist named—oh, gosh, now I can't remember. He had an Egyptian name. Kemit Ahmenophis?

MASON:: We can fill it in later.

JACKSON:: Yeah. Anyway, he was the curator at the time. But then, of course, I had an ugly experience from the man who was the director of the building, and I don't even want to talk about that. He was being controlled by the city people who where trying to get all blacks out of that building, and he just had no concept of what the art was about. Again, there was always somebody who has no concept but who is the administrator of all these programs. But that experience was positive in a way of having an exhibition. But of course, the invitations got out late, so people didn't know and didn't get to see the exhibit. What did you ask me originally?

MASON:: Oh, well, you had talked about the things that didn't go right with the projects for the council.

JACKSON:: So what I realized was that, you know, like that gallery had received some funding from the arts council. Wajumbe [Cultural Institution] was still in existence, you know, receiving. I saw a lot of organizations and a lot of groups. I was invited to lecture and would see occasionally that they'd say, "This organization was partially funded by the California Arts Council." So I realized that even though I never got a grant or that I couldn't get grants from the arts council, I did participate in some programs where there was funding that came through from our council, not from the one after. But: these were groups that were in existence—for example, Pickle Family Circus is in existence as a theater circus group here now. They were originally funded by the California Arts Council. Nobody had heard of them; they were just a little struggling group. The theater company I just worked with, California Shakespeare Festival. The Oakland Ballet I believe received an original grant. It's now an international company. Maybe Dimensions Dance Theater, which is a black dance company here in the Bay Area. There were many groups that were helped initially that would not have received funding, and now many of them have become self-sufficient. I think that when I see groups that have become self-sufficient, who don't depend on grants—Oakland Ensemble Theater is another. Now it's a self-sustaining company. And it get grants and funding, all the groups get—but they get different kinds of funding now on a larger level. Maybe it's $250,000 or $25,000 as opposed to a $5,000 grant from the arts council. So they've become self-sustaining through their box office, through other means, as opposed to having to live and exist only because of the council. Some of the children's programs that I've seen to me are more successful. When you see the response of children and what comes out of programs that they have results from and they feel really proud of what they've done, to me those are the most successful. And then these young people who then go on as a result of this initial experience, and it helps to change their lives and their directions. Then I can say those things are positive. I thought the arts council experience, while that council existed, although there were problems, a great deal of hope for people came through. But then, of course, this was the Jimmy [James E.] Carter [and] [Walter F.] Mondale reign of life, which was very short. And they were people who were very sensitive to the arts because they participated in the arts. And Jerry Brown. I mean, that kind of form of government was a Utopian kind of government in a sense. But people don't want to make sacrifices; they don't want to give up anything. And under a person like Jerry Brown, then you've got to give up some goodies. You don't drive a Cadillac, you drive a Ford. People on the council don't get free tickets because in a sense that's a form of bribery—even though it isn't. We were always saying, "Well, how are we going to go out and see these people's work if we don't have tickets to get in?" We'd have to do it another way. But people don't want to cut back in order to move ahead. I think that's part of what kind of changes have to happen in government in this country, period. People keep wanting an either/or choice, the lesser of two evils, as opposed to saying, "No, I don't want to take either one of these. Let's find another way and initiate something else and take another path." Nobody here wants to take that kind of a risk. Other countries are doing it. I mean, they're dissolving their governments. Good or bad, they're dissolving whole governments and having to start from scratch with something else. We're too blocked into the system of things here and the paternal order of following directions from white men. And people are beginning to recognize it, but not many. So I don't know what's going to happen with life here on this planet.

MASON:: Well, the last question I wanted to ask was—you had worked with the Black Arts Council, and you had seen how they did a lot of things with no funding. Then you worked with the [California] Arts Commission, which got tons of taxpayers' money.

JACKSON:: Well, we didn't get tons.

MASON:: Well, a couple of million [dollars].

JACKSON:: We started with a million dollars, and then it finally got up to something like two million dollars.

MASON:: Well, that's true. That's like fifty cents a head.

JACKSON:: What we did was identify arts moneys that were being used in other state agencies, so that made the budget for arts and the spending for arts. We made them recognize the amount of money that was already being spent, which was to tell them, "You are spending this money, so the budget does need to be increased, and you need to identify these places and find out what it is they are really doing"—arts in education or in the schools or in social work programs. So that was to recognize. And I don't know how that budget went up. I remember it was something like $2.7 million. But that's not very much money.

MASON:: No, I think somebody averaged it to something like fifty cents a person. But, I mean, compared to the average paycheck of the head security guard of the Los Angeles County Museum [of Art] trying to do something versus working with state funding—yeah, it was wrong for me to say tons of money, because it's hardly true. I mean, there are always statistics about how far California is behind other states. Like Utah has a bigger budget.

JACKSON:: And I think Rhode Island. Rhode Island has tons of money, and they're a state that's barely on the map, a dot there. But they had a bigger budget than California, I think, at the time by comparison. It was either Rhode Island or Delaware, one of those little bitty states that had a lot of money.

MASON:: So I guess the question was, basically having dealt with sort of more of a grassroots approach to funding and exhibitions, how did that play out in your service at the California Arts Council as far as your philosophy about what the role of government should be in helping the arts communities in the states?

JACKSON:: Basically, our philosophy was that we pay tax dollars—we participate in these on a more—grassroots was the terminology that was used—grassroots level, that all the people who participate by giving their tax dollars should also be represented by the kinds of arts that exist within their communities, and that the art should be in their communities and not just have to go across town to the symphony or the opera for something that doesn't really represent you. For example, when I worked as a ballet dancer and I had to wear "Al" makeup, I had to look like a white girl with the rest of the corps de ballet, and one other black girl who danced with me. So who would know we were even on stage? So it didn't really represent anybody in the community. We didn't represent the community. So that was the philosophy, that basically each community should be represented by the arts in its community. The judgment of what that community wants to participate in in art should be their choice. Not the choice of somebody else, a council telling them if you live in Vacaville or you live up in Eureka or you live up in Sierra City, then you've got to have a symphony when maybe they want to have a hoedown band or something. So we can't dictate what people should consider to represent them as art either culturally or by region or community. Those people should have a choice about what it is they want to participate in and what it is they want to fund. That's how we were trying to make that process include the artists and people of the community. Even when it came to making choices for the one percent of art in the state office buildings, the office workers in the building who had to live with that stuff every day were given the opportunity to make some choices and to look at the artwork and to maybe vote on or have panels where they also made some choices about the artwork that was put into their buildings. That was in the offices where they had to live. So of the artwork that was commissioned, there were some bigger works that may have been commissioned into the architecture, but if those people had to live with this art every day, they were given some choices out of what was there in the choosing, in the competition, to make those choices for themselves, and what they thought that the people coming into the office would also like to see.

MASON:: But would you ever advocate just completely abolishing state funds for the arts and have each community kind of have a little pool where each person would come and put a dollar into the community art center?

JACKSON:: I think we tried that, and we were trying to get to that.

MASON:: Oh.

JACKSON:: Not necessarily abolishing the state funding, but making community funding more viable. I think that in one of our radical meetings we probably did think that we could possibly try to get it down to that, where there would really be more community control. That was what we were really trying to get to. And that maybe the community would be funded by the state, and then that community would be able to use those funds in the way they saw fit within their communities. So that was sort of trying to get this down to where the people were really making their own decisions about how they wanted to spend their tax dollars. And I suppose if the council had gone on for another—how many years were we in? Was it eight years that Jerry Brown was in? He really wanted us to spend the whole term with him. He was a little annoyed with me because I left.

MASON:: You left just after he was re-elected? Or just before.

JACKSON:: I left in '78, I think. I wasn't willing to continue for more terms because I couldn't afford it financially. I wasn't painting anymore. I was a financial wreck being on that council. We only received a $100 honorarium, I think, for each meeting. So one meeting a month, and no more than two meetings a month and that was only in an emergency, and we're working twenty-four hours a day for thirty days, thirty-one days out of a month, you can't live on that and do your work. It's hard to do your work unless you've got a staff. But, yeah, if it had gone another term, maybe three terms, then maybe some of the things that we really were trying to keep going—but I think also because the energies of the people who were on the council initially—there's just a certain point of burnout. You just can't maintain that. Noah [Purifoy] stayed there for I guess three terms or something like that. But you just don't get the same kind of energy from succeeding people. I mean, you really have to do a gradual transition of having people drop out and having new people come in so that they can get into the flavor of what's been going on. And there was so much history within the short time we were there. I mean, we came in popping immediately and causing a lot of controversy and upstart just by the nature of who we were when we came in there.

MASON:: You were working artists, by God.

JACKSON:: Yeah, Peter being you know this ex-hippie-yippie. We were all just a bizarre bunch of people who were up there. They just thought we were the wildest group of folks that anybody could combine. Even Karney Hodge, who was a businessman in his suits and briefcase, I mean, he was an Armenian too, right? So that made him weird, from the Fresno Valley. So what should he know? And he's up there with all these wild artist types, though. He was considered just as bizarre as the rest of us. And he was very flexible and willing, and even if he hadn't heard of an idea, when he finally heard it it was like, "Oh, I never thought of that. Oh, okay." And he'd join in with us on a lot of things. He gave us a lot of argument, but—because he was the practical business side of things and kind of a leveler. But even Karney was considered bizarre with the rest of us. They just had a hard time dealing with this fact that a bunch of artists—are you serious? Some artists, when you've had some real businesspeople spending all this money? Well, a million dollars goes very fast, you know. Any one of us could go out and spend a million dollars in a day easily. It's not that much money.

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE AUGUST 16, 1992

MASON:: You wanted to add something about your later works, the works you did in the 1980s, about your conceptions and perceptions about what you were doing.

JACKSON:: Well, I think that from the very beginning, when I started working with whites, I was not just working with the idea of white paint. It had to do with the fact that from my perception that there was no such thing as a pure white. There are many, many kinds of whites, as there are many kinds of blacks. So basically I was working with color as form and color relationships and space and as space. So the whites in a sense as—even though blacks and whites are neutrals and not colors but working with the color that exists within each form of white and then grows very gradually into pigmentation of full color—so that now, going through the eighties and into the nineties, I guess I've gone from pure white backgrounds—and I'm experimenting now with going probably the opposite direction, which is through color, a deep color spectrum, into darks, or from dark out through the color as opposed to from light to dark. So I'm going from dark to light now, I think. And who knows what's going to happen with that. It could be that everything I'm doing right now is all underpainting, and then some other things will happen with the underpainting. Last night I was going over the list from the paint company where I get my paint [Artex Manufacturing Company]. I had started experimenting with a lot of the pearlescent colors, which are very similar to the concept of the color hues and tints that are slightly visible in whites so that—and they have a whole spectrum of pearlescence that come from the color and in a sense are whites with the pearlescent color in the understructure. So I was getting kind of excited about that last night, that when I am able to order some paints, then I will be able to work with maybe some more of those pearlescent colors in the white, which is very similar to what happens in the morning when the dew is on leaves and plants. I had someone tell me at one point that some of the kind of fluorescent and pearlescent color that I was using was not natural and it was not from nature, and I just said that's absurd, because all color comes from nature. And if you look in nature and you take a walk through the woods, and even in the city, and you look from morning to evening to dawn, there are some incredible pearlescent and fluorescent colors that happen in nature. And it's just that kind of subtlety that occurs. And then human beings take on that spectrum within the clothing and the really kind of bizarre things that we do with color, especially now. And the kids are doing fun things in hip-hop in the clothes that they wear, which is kind of art. And I know that each period and each phase that young people go through, we sort of make fun of what they're doing with clothes and hair and all that, but I think it's kind of interesting what's happening with young people now, especially people of color, because they're going back to their ethnic heritage, their original cultures. And they may not be aware of what they're doing. I'm looking at young men on the street, and they're looking so much like the original people who live in different cultures in Africa—what they are doing with their hair, whether they are smearing it, or whether they are sculpturing it or structuring it. And then the colors that they are wearing one on top of the other. And the patterns of the color are actually kind of a new form of what is very old, whether they are aware of it or not.

MASON:: You don't see it as something that's cyclical like the dashikis and now the kente cloth? Or do you think that there is a progression? Do you think that people are learning more and more about history?

JACKSON:: Well, I'm going beyond kente cloth, this fake kente cloth that everybody is wearing, which has nothing to do with—they don't understand that each family has a piece of kente cloth that tells the history of what their family was and a story about the group that they lived with. So I just don't even think about the kente cloth as anything more than an American manufactured version of some colors on some cloth that helps some young people have some kind of fake identity about their African heritage. But I think more of just some of the kids who are wearing these patterns and patches of clothes with the trousers hung real slung down beneath their butts and the way the women are kind of wrapping themselves in these multicolored jackets and the big earrings. It's kind of bizarre—some of it ugly—but then aesthetically it's another aesthetic that's anti-European in a sense. So in a positive sense I can look at that, the kids sort of tattooing themselves and branding themselves and cutting their hair into sculpture and all of that. It's a very daring way of using the body as artform, which I don't think—I think we did in some different ways. I always go back to David Hammons, you know, who would have a half a head of hair one day and half of a beard. Or he'd come back in—because his hair would grow so fast on his face and his head. He would always sort of experiment with what he was doing. I guess I did, as well. I forget I had some very bizarre looks with wrapped hair with colored yarn and stuff in the seventies.

MASON:: I have a picture, and I want to ask if this is you in here. This is from the Woman's Building. This is from [Womanspace Journal March-April] 1973. In the top right-hand corner, is this you?

JACKSON:: Oh, no. That's a beautiful photograph.

MASON:: Oh, that's not you?

JACKSON:: I think that woman was an actress. A lot of people thought that this one was me or that this one was me.

MASON:: Now, on the bottom, that's Ruth Waddy.

JACKSON:: That's Ruth.

MASON:: That's Samella Lewis.

JACKSON:: And I think this is Betye Saar. This is Sherry Ayo. That's Sherry.

MASON:: Oh, okay.

JACKSON:: That's the woman whose idea it was to do that exhibition.

MASON:: Yeah, okay.

JACKSON:: And at that time she was living with me, I think. Yeah, we all sat around on the floor.

MASON:: Okay. I was just wondering if the woman with the beaded—

JACKSON:: What is this from? This is "Reflections on Black Mirror" by Claudia Chapline. Yeah.

MASON:: Yeah, that was on the The Sapphire Show show from Womanspace [Journal] from 1973.

JACKSON:: Oh, this is interesting about me being interested in African and Egyptian history. That's interesting: "From fields of white, mustard flowers, birds, and heart-shaped symbols of freedom and love." [laughs] I don't know where that comes from. See, that's part of the way people interpret what you do. Heart and birds, symbols of freedom and love. Maybe I said something like that one time."But they evoke the feelings of ancient frescoes." Yeah. You see, at the time also—I think it's like as you grow, how your work is interpreted—now, this might be me right here. That little bitty hair, that little fine hair and that little ear there, that might be me, but I'm not sure. That's on page—?

MASON:: Twenty.

JACKSON:: Yeah, because we all sat around in a circle and we talked about the work. It's kind of interesting. This is Marie Johnson [Calloway]'s work here.

MASON:: That's Betye Saar's Measure for Measure, which they reproduce on page—

JACKSON:: Over here on this side? I wouldn't even have thought that was Betye Saar. It doesn't even look like Betye Saar's work. It does in here. But this is kind of an interesting thing. I forget this woman's name. She was an actress or dancer, I think.

MASON:: And who was this guy?

JACKSON:: Oh, that's Zayd [Darwish]. That's my big brother Zayd. He's a filmmaker. He's like a first-generation Sudanese. In this country his father—he was a filmmaker that I met here in Berkeley. And Tony Williams was a filmmaker that I sort of spent time with. Tony coordinated the film for Black Expo ['72], and I did the artwork. So we all sort of moved to Southern California in a way. Zayd was working on film there with an independent filmmaker [Carolyn Sides]. The last time I saw him was I guess in the middle of the late seventies. He was on his way maybe to Florida because his father was there. Yeah. I haven't seen Zayd in a long time. And Sherry. This is a beautiful photograph, actually, of Sherry. That's the only photograph I know; I'm sure there must be others. But this is the woman who was responsible for what David Driskell and all those other people get credit for. And her name Ayo is a straight African name. It's a name that did not get changed in the process of everybody else getting their names changed here in this country. So she can trace her family all the way back. Yeah, that's interesting to have that. Where did that come from?

MASON:: This is that journal they started called Womanspace Journal.

JACKSON:: So that's in the white women's building or what?

MASON:: Yeah, this was when they started Womanspace. They started a journal. This is 1973. When was the building actually founded? But this was started by the original founders of the Woman's Building like Miriam Schapiro and Sheila [Levrant De Bretteville].

JACKSON:: Yeah, exactly. And that was a completely different group of women as far as what they were into, I think, at that time as artists. They were really artists. And this was still during that period where basically artists just took the initiative to do things, just as I did when I was starting Gallery 32. It wasn't about money or anything like that. Just decide, "Oh, well, where is a space for us to gather and maybe—?" And in Los Angeles, I think just because all the arts were so new—I mean, basically my mother used to call Los Angeles a big country town. The whole way of Los Angeles is kind of like a big country town. People just do things and they don't know what they're doing, or they don't base it upon history in many ways. So I think that a lot of people were just sort of getting together and doing things not realizing that what they were starting was a process of critique or a process of beginning to try to make or put together theories or to see what the problems were that were there that everybody was faced with without really having an understanding of, "Well, this is a process to find out what it is we're doing. How do we ask each other the questions about what it is we're doing?" I think that's what it was, but it just happened without being academic or intellectual. People just sort of did it. So it was making a forum for presentation or exchange, because quite often people were very isolated working. I think a lot of the black artists were probably very isolated working. Maybe they'd go to work in the day and they'd do their work. And it was just by coincidence that people—and maybe the Watts [Summer] Festival [of Art] sort of drew a bunch of people together as a focus point so that they even knew that other artists existed. Otherwise I would have been working alone as well. Or just knowing a scattered bunch of maybe white artists, Mexican artists, Asian, in Echo Park.

MASON:: Did you know about the Golden State [Mutual Afro-American Art] Collection that was opened in '65, where Bill [William] Pajaud collected a lot of work by African American artists? Especially some of the local women artists like Beulah Woodard—no, I don't know if he had Beulah Woodard. But I know P'lla Mills and people like that. Was that a space that people went to to kind of find. out about the history of black art or that you went to at all?

JACKSON:: No. You know what's really curious? The funny thing is that the first black artist that I met in Los Angeles was Bill Pajaud, I think. I met him through a friend of mine whose name was Smitty. Well, his name was Walter Smith, actually. We both worked at the post office. Smitty used to play cards with Bill Pajaud and a number of other people. And there was a photographer who was at Bill Pajaud's studio. Gosh, he's a really well- known—Moorehead, Mr. Moorehead. Howard Moorehead. I think that was his name.

MASON:: Yeah, I know who you mean.

JACKSON:: Well, I met the two of them at Bill Pajaud's apartment studio through Smitty. This was way back in 1967 probably. Because he said, "I know this guy who's an artist. Maybe we'll stop by there and see him." So I met the two of them there. And he may have told me about the collection there. But they didn't talk much, because they were older guys, and it's in the sense of the way a lot of black men are now—now that I'm older I understand it—where they just don't even talk or they don't give recognition. If you're a woman there with a bunch of men that are used to talking with each other, they just talk all around you.

MASON:: Drinking buddies.

JACKSON:: Yeah, they are all drinking and card-playing buddies, and they talk around you. They kind of flirt with you on the side and all of this, and they don't take you seriously. So that was my first meeting with Bill Pajaud. And of course, when somebody says another person is an artist or a painter, then people say "yeah, yeah, yeah" until they see your work or until they see your studio. They see you in the studio with paint all over you because they happen to drop by one day; then they realize that you're really serious. So later on is when I finally made the connection with Bill Pajaud and who he was, after I had met some of the other artists and that collection at Golden State [Mutual Life Insurance Company]. I think I probably only dropped by there a few times. The mural that I painted, the big one, Spirit, was just around the corner. Occasionally I'd go by there. And I remember they had the most beautiful balcony up there, and I'd kind of go up and sit on the balcony and eat my lunch with my assistant. Because it's kind of an art deco building, I believe, if I remember.

MASON:: Yeah.

JACKSON:: There was something about that building, the way that balcony is up there on the top. It's like a balustrade all around the building.

MASON:: Yeah. That's where the murals are by Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston.

JACKSON:: Yeah, and it's like this discovery. It was just so incredible. And I thought it was really something when I was listening to the radio and listening to the fact that everything around there was being burned but people saved Golden State Mutual Life. It's like they at least had respect for that place, because it's one of the few places—for example, they published a calendar of Charles White's drawings. And I know people in grocery stores on the corner—I think that's like probably one of the most incredible pieces of artwork that was passed out to just common people, because people relished and cherished those Charles White calendars. You'd go into a liquor store, or you'd go into a grocery store, a little corner grocery store, and you'd see this Charles White calendar displayed with a great deal of pride. I think probably some of those people who may have been burning grew up with that and they remembered it. So I think that that was a great service from that life insurance company, having at least that—you know, whether any of us as artists agreed with it. You know, they never bothered to collect any of my work for that, in that collection. But that's okay, because, as I said, not everybody likes everything that's out there. I just feel good that at least Charles White's work was respected there, because I still don't believe that Charles White has received his due. I look at photos of him and I want to cry, because the last year that he was really ill—it's like when somebody is really close to you and you don't want to believe that they're really sick, I think. Or you're so used to them being around, and then all of a sudden he was just not here anymore. He didn't want his family to go through his being on life support, so he said, "Pull the plug," and then he wasn't there. I didn't even see him in his last year. And the nice thing was that his wife Fran [Frances White] had told me that he thought that I was one of his special students, and that was just like a gift to get. That was one of the last things that she sort of said that he said, to make sure that I knew that. And it made me feel very badly, because I didn't get to see him while he was ill. You know, that's just one of those sort of regretful things. I think probably that and the fact that I didn't get to go and work with Elizabeth Catlett, I think that—I started talking about women whom I really had a great deal of respect for: Elizabeth Catlett, Ruth Asawa, Barbara Chase-Riboud. When I was younger there was Janet Collins, who was the first black prima ballerina at the Met [Metropolitan Opera]. That's when I was studying dance, so I knew of her, and Maria Tallchief, who was the first Indian prima ballerina. So those were some early people whom I really respected. And then, of course, later meeting Elizabeth Catlett and—oh, I had another list of names of women that I really felt—you know, of course, Louise Nevelson, whom I did meet. And the fact that I feel as if now I'm kind of going through a very similar stage that she went through in her mid-to-late forties, where there were points where she just felt like she was ready to leave this earth. I mean, it's like the whole world was crashing in. And how do you start all over again? It's like you have to sell everything, or you have to—there's a point where you think it's all over with and that you're not going to be able to work anymore, and what's the point of your being here? She sort of got over that through her late forties and had to make some major decisions. And you have to make major decisions about being alone. It's when you realize—as she said at one point, a very favorite man of hers invited her to dinner, and she realized that they spent more money on that one dinner than it would have cost her to live for a half a month or so, or a month. Whatever it was, it was relative to what it would have been for her to buy supplies and live, to go out to dinner and spend all that money. It was very elegant and all that. It was a frivolous kind of a thing that just wasn't important to her anymore. I think I've come to that point as well, where I'd rather spend my time writing and working. And if it means being absolutely alone to do that—although the arrangement I have right now is perfect, because we share—we have studio spaces totally separate; we are right next door to each other, Arthur [Monroe] and me.

MASON:: And your son [Rafiki Casey Dedrick Smith-Mhunzi] comes to visit you.

JACKSON:: Well, he hasn't yet. Eventually he will be able to, I'm sure, and that will be okay. But the distance now where I'm really establishing my own space again—and this will be the first time since I had Gallery 32 and had studio space above—but even then I had other obligations, which was to keep the gallery going. You know, I had a big dog and a cat. I was always taking care of somebody else. So now it's really just me working. And I think that probably—this is like that peak you get over as a more mature human being, to thoughtfully put together all those things that you've done before. I think that all the things that I've done before have just been studies, and they're preliminary to what happens now. So I think that more than likely the work that I do from here on is more important work and it's more mature work.

MASON:: We started off talking about your experiments with color now, and I wanted to ask how that is related to subject matter. Which comes first? Or which is more important? I don't know if that is the right question to ask. But how are they related?

JACKSON:: No, that's a good question, because I'm realizing that just from the stuff that I've put down on the walls on this paper—without consciously thinking about what I was going to put on the paper, I just started putting forms and shapes and colors down just so I could touch the paper. I remember Samella talking about it a long time ago. It's that same thing that happens, where you have this big white canvas—I mean, Bernie [Bernard T.] Casey has talked about it. Every artist I know has talked about it. You've got the materials up there, and you have this big white space, or you've got this ochre space, or you've got these materials sitting there, and you sit for weeks just looking at them. It's like you're afraid to even touch them. And you start to make the first stroke. So it's like even making the. first stroke on these pieces of cheap paper I have in here—what came out, you know, there is a figure that is just lying there. It's coming from, I'm sure, those times in these past few years that I have stepped over bodies in the street, especially in New Haven and New York, and people lying in the snow. An image of when I got off the train in Philadelphia to go work in the theater there—I never will forget this man at the post, at the bottom of the stairway as you go up into the train depot—you get off the train, you have to go up these flights of old-fashioned stairs, and at the base of this stair post were three dirty, grubby Triskets, those little square cracker things. And this man picked them up to eat them. All these people were rushing by him, but it didn't matter. He picked them up right there because he was hungry. And who knows what had gone on around that post. I mean, people pee in the stations and everything else. But he was so hungry he ate them. I think a lot of what is coming out of the drawings and things that I'm doing now have to do with what I've seen and also what I've experienced. Because in a sense, even though—we've been so close in my family to being without a place to live, without food, in the past few years that—and homeless in a sense. I was homeless in a way, even though I had friends to go to. So I'm more privileged than those people who live in the street and have no other alternatives, but I have not had a place to live or a place of my own. So I think that the combination of what color goes on the page and what the imagery is, the strength of the color, the strength of the stroke—there is a certain kind of passion that goes into the way the materials are used and touched and put down. And then what comes out of it on the page is that thing that comes out of this life experience. And what it is one does not speak of, but I guess it's fortunate being a visual artist, because it comes out in the work. So if you can't really talk about it in the right kind of words, then visually I think it comes out. And I have a feeling that's what's happening on the wall in there. It's something other than I think that I would think. It's not the light and airy that everybody thought of me as doing before; it's probably just deeper, more intense work. I don't expect any kind of same response to the work that people may have had in the past, because what may come out may be too intense for people even to want to deal with. So I don't know. It's just the beginning at this point, what I'm doing and what I'm working on. So who knows even by next year what could come from it. I think the environment that I'm in now—I've always had a garden, I've always had a yard, and I have been able to go outside. When you can go out into nature it helps to sort of soften the intensity of what happens in the city. I know that when I was living up in the mountains in Idyllwild [California]—I think it's the same thing that Alice Walker is going through, or anybody else who leaves the city. You leave the city because you don't want to—you need a certain amount of peace from what it is you see going on every day. While I was in the country, in the mountains, I didn't have people in my paintings, because there's nature all around. Now I'm back in the city, and there's a lot of people in it. So in a sense there's a kind of intense message that comes from the environment that you live within. Maybe what will happen is that there will be the combination of the two things. I think so. You know, the incredible weeds and dandelion and anise and things that grow around here that come out of the concrete in spite of all the pollution and the trucks and the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] and the trains that go by, there are certain types of things that just grow anyway. And in a sense black people continue to do that. We just grow out of the harsh environment. And I'm sure—I don't know. I say I'm sure, but I don't know. It's like even with AIDS and drugs, whether we end up becoming some mutation of all of this, there is something tough under our skin to sort of—some people survive this thing that is going on right now with all of this plague. It's like this triple-double plague that goes on. I'm even sitting here looking at these drawers in front of me that were left from the people who were here in the studio before, and they have this sort of deep, intense color on them that's just pure pigment, and I see in a way that's almost what's happening with the color that I'm doing now, where it's kind of base pigment and strong color that probably reflects more of what is the atmosphere of what's happening now. So I'm more than likely to be working with form, just the intense form, shapes. And the aura now is quite different from what the aura was in the sixties and seventies. You know, it was what we thought life was and that reality/fantasy that I talked about. Now there's a different kind of reality, and fantasy is almost wiped out, because fantasies almost don't exist anymore, I don't think, except maybe on television or something, and I don't watch television. But I think that's probably the only place there's any fantasy about how people live and all of that. It's all sort of sitcom and quick cute answers and expressions and sayings to get from the beginning of thirty minutes to the end of a thirty-minute program as opposed to what's really happening in life. It's like cute answers to the problems as opposed to really thoughtful, well-thought-through solutions to problems.

MASON:: So I guess this is a good time to talk about your going to Yale [University Repertory School of Drama]. Because the big question, of course, is was that something that was a side step or do you think an integral part of your development as a painter? Well, we might as well start at the beginning. I mean how did you decide to put that application in the mail?

JACKSON:: Well, when I left Idyllwild, California, which is the place we were living in up in the mountains—after my father [Roy Dedrick Jackson] died in 1981—I'd always for many years wanted to go live in the mountains, and then I discovered Idyllwild because of Noah Purifoy, when we were on the [California Arts] Council, saying that he had gone up to a meeting up in this place that was up in the mountains. It was a mile high, but they had to wind around like twenty-seven miles to get up to this place. And it was in the darkness. And it was so foggy they couldn't see six feet in front of them. He was going up for a conference that Jonas Salk and François Gilot had put together. Noah was interested in phenomenology. He still is. So they were having this conference, and he'd gone up to this place. And when he described it and he'd described this sort of horrifying trip they'd taken up and how it was foggy and awful, I thought, "That sounds fantastic. That's where I want to go." So I went up there and kept going up for different trips. And eventually after my father died—and I had sort of a very bizarre happening with the house that I owned and the person that I knew who was kind of a con artist it turned out—so I was offered a job to go up and take the job that François Gilot had as the main painting instructor in Idyllwild, so—

MASON:: This was Elliott-Pope [Preparatory School]?

JACKSON:: No, actually it was ISOMATA, which was Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, which at that time was a part of USC [University of Southern California]. USC sort of was a cosponsor or co-owner. Later it went back to being just Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts. Anyway, it was sort of under the aegis of USC. I was there for a couple of weeks during the summer as a painting instructor, and during that three weeks that I was there I found a little cabin and decided I would buy it. Then I came back to L.A. and moved my son up there, and we lived there for four years. And then my mother [Ann-Marie Butler Jackson] was having problems with her property after my father died, because everybody and his brother and sister was trying to steal the property from her, and there were a lot of complications with that. So we decided, even though we didn't really want to leave Idyllwild, that—eventually before I left Idyllwild I did start teaching at the Elliott-Pope School, which at that time was the Desert Sun School. That was twenty-four hours a day for ten months of the year. You spent a lot of time with everybody else's kids, and your own kind of floated through. It's kind of a socialist environment in the sense that all the faculty children were part of the school. You ate all your meals there: breakfast six thirty in the morning, lunch, dinner. And you participated in activities with the kids and had study halls. It was a boarding school with kids from everywhere, mostly white kids that got dumped up in our beautiful environment. But I was still working while I was there, interestingly enough. Even though I thought, "God, I never really have time to work enough." And I had my dream house eventually; High Castle was the place we lived. But then my mother was having problems, so we decided to come back to San Francisco to try to help her out. And that was difficult, because I didn't realize at the time I hadn't lived in my family house for over twenty-some years. So we were trying to help her. But I got back to the Bay Area, and part of what I said in 1968—"I would never work outside of the arts"—all of a sudden was dissolved, where the only jobs to get were—when I was younger I had worked as a model here, when I was sort of acting and dancing. So I ended up going to a modeling agency, and the first job they offered me was to pass out cigarette coupons. I said, no, I wouldn't do it. But they were offering very high pay, and it was the way to get into the agency to do other things. So I thought, "How can I compromise and say no when actually we need money?" So you pass out cigarette coupons to people who were smokers. I'm standing on a street corner in San Francisco, and who should show up but one of my former students who knew that I did not like cigarette smoking. Then Larry Walker showed up smoking a cigarette on the corner, and he took coupons, and here I am—

MASON:: Who's Larry Walker?

JACKSON:: Larry Walker is the man who was the head of the art department at Stockton at the University of the Pacific. He was the one who organized the first solo exhibition that I had. He's an artist, and I believe now he is the head chair of the fine arts department. It's either University of Georgia—it's that complex of colleges, Clark Colleges in Atlanta. It's that whole group. He has a very important position there. Anyway, here he shows up, and I'm standing on the street corner, right? The person everyone knows is an artist is handing out cigarette coupons. Then later that same agency hired me to work as a fragrance model in stores here. And then I ended up working in a pearl store [Crown Pearls International] and becoming the manager of this pearl store on Pier 39. So here I was in San Francisco working all these jobs that were not art jobs. They were just jobs, not really painting. Then I realized that here I was forty-some years old, and maybe I was out of touch with what was changing and all of the things that were changing. I worked also with Wajumbe Cultural Institution for about six months partly as a volunteer and then working on the Lagos cultural exchange project. And although I was supposed to be paid, I did not get paid. So that was kind of a financial disaster, as well. So I ended up having to take this job at the pearl store. So then one day I guess I was looking through Black Enterprise magazine, and there was a little bitty picture of Lloyd Richards. And it was an ad saying that fellowships were available to minority people, people of different color in the school of drama in the areas of technical design, design, acting, and administration, all the areas in theater.

MASON:: And Lloyd Richards was on the faculty?

JACKSON:: Lloyd Richards was the dean of the school. And I didn't know that the dean of the school at Yale was a black man. When my son was eight years old, because he was acting then and studying acting, he'd figured out that all of his favorite actors, Sorrell Brooke, even some bizarre people that were on television and in sitcoms, had graduated from Yale School of Drama. So he decided that that was where he wanted to go to school. And I thought that was great. And I was curious, "How did he find that out? How did he know this?" Somehow he had researched this and he'd found it out. Well, I had no idea that Lloyd Richards was a black man and that he was the dean of the school of one of—supposedly the best, the finest theater people were coming out of Yale School of Drama. And there had been a connection at San Francisco State [College] in the drama school with the Guthrie [Theatre]. And evidently San Francisco State, because it was a professional school of theater, although a lot of people didn't know it, it had this sort of subtle reputation that the quality of the students and the actors that come out of San Francisco State was very high in most areas—in creative writing and in the fine arts department and in theater and dance. It's a real subtle thing where people have that in the back of their history but it is not flashed all over the place. So the exchange—and I didn't realize it until I went to my interview and I said I was from San Francisco State, and everybody lit up, like, "Oh, great, if you worked there in theater." But the first year, because I was working with Wajumbe, I was really busy, and I didn't fill out the application. And I didn't think my portfolio was ready for costume designing, even though I had a lot of art in it. The second year, when I didn't get paid at Wajumbe and when that just seemed like a total disaster and everything, I decided—I was determined there was no way I could continue to stay here in the Bay Area living at my mother's house. It seemed as if it was more of a disaster that we left the mountains. It seemed as if it would have been better if my son had stayed there in that school where I was teaching. I was afraid, because these kids tended to get very heavily off into drugs, because their families were wealthy, they had money. Every young person who came there to the school would somehow get involved in the drugs there, and I didn't want my son in that kind of environment, even though academically it was very good. There was a one-to-one kind of ratio—more than that it was like a six-to-one ratio of teachers to students in the school, so it was excellent as far the academics and the wilderness and the fine arts combination there. So we left that, and I came here. It turned out to be more of a disaster coming back to the Bay Area. And for me, I feel very strongly the vibration that goes on here, where basically people have settled on very sacred Indian land, and a lot of the eruptions that go on here with earthquakes and natural disaster I think are kind of part of that whole spiritual element that happens here, where the land is very unhappy with what goes on and the abuse here. So I decided finally to go ahead, because I just felt like I was going deeper and deeper backwards as opposed to forward, that I would apply in theater. I felt as if that made sense. I didn't want to get a master's degree in painting. What do I need a master's degree in painting for? I just have always fought that, and I didn't think it was necessary. But I knew that in my drama minor I had almost as many units as I did in my painting major, and I had a huge painting major. We had so many units that we had to do before we could even get out of there. And I'd worked professionally in theater, so I thought that was to my advantage, so maybe I would be able to get in. But I still didn't think I would. And it happened that I needed to be in New York, or there was a cheap ticket, and I felt that if I at least went in for a personal interview with my portfolio it might be to my advantage. And I did. I think I had one of the last appointments. It turned out I was there during spring break, so some of the instructors weren't there. I was interviewed by Ming Cho Lee and Michael Yergen and Leon Katz, I believe, who is a historian, dramaturg, and director. And I didn't realize at the who Ming Cho Lee was. As a child I had see his sets.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO AUGUST 16, 1992

MASON:: Okay, you were talking about Ming Cho Lee.

JACKSON:: Yeah. As a child—well, not really. I guess I wasn't that young. But I had seen his sets at the opera, and I didn't realize—I didn't make the connection when I went for the interview. And I guess I'm fortunate, because sometimes I'm really ignorant or naive when I go into these situations. It's just like taking the painting in that show when I was younger and the paintings in the Watts Festival. I didn't really realize who it was I was going to be interviewed by. So I would probably have been more nervous and less self-assured when I went into the interview if I had realized that Ming Cho Lee was this man who has taught every major theater designer in the country just about, and that he is very strict and very disciplined and very hard on his students. Anyway, Ming asked me, wouldn't I prefer to just be a special student of his and to apprentice under him? Well, for me, I couldn't do that. If I was going to do this and go to school, I would have to have a full program, because it meant moving Rafiki and moving all the way across country. I couldn't just sort of run into New York and sort of follow him around and sort of maybe have something and sort of maybe not, because it meant completely moving.

MASON:: Did that mean he was really impressed with your portfolio in interview?

JACKSON:: Yeah. It was funny, because the things in my portfolio—they said when they were describing how to put a portfolio together they didn't want to see slick things and stuff all framed.

MASON:: And ten-page resumes.

JACKSON:: Yeah. They wanted to see just the rough things that were naturally yours. So actually I sort of threw in—and I was trying to find some of the early makeup designs that I had done when I was a student and some set and costume drawings from then. I didn't find them. What I did was, also there was a play that I liked [Woyengi] by a Nigerian playwright [Obotunde Ijimere], and I did drawings for the characters in that play as a new piece, a new work. Because I just finished working with the Nigerians, so it was kind of wonderful and fresh in my mind, and seeing all the beautiful fabrics and textures and things that they had used, which were real Nigerian fabric. So I did the drawings to illustrate this Nigerian play, which of course they weren't aware of and didn't know anything about. And then I had some dance drawings. I also had the drawings and mockups I had done for the set I had designed for Grease, and some costume photographs. That was the last play I had done when I was at Elliott-Pope, where we basically built this two-story set. I had no idea what I was doing building a two-story set or designing it at the time, but it fit, because it was in a gymnasium. We just did it. We had done this throughout the time we were working at Elliott-Pope, because we integrated music, theater, and the visual arts. And we all worked together. I'd worked with a director, another dancer-director, Earl Weaver. He and I just really worked well together with the kids in the fine arts program. So I used those designs from that set in the portfolio. And they were impressed. They liked them. And this stuff was very raw. Now looking at it I'd be very embarrassed, because after being there in the design department and learning how to really do the drafting for sets and all the mechanical things and technical things that are necessary, it's like I never would have walked in there with that stuff. But they wanted to see raw work from people who—Ming prefers to take students who have the potential, who can be trained into doing it the way—as opposed to somebody who's already probably learned from somebody else and learned incorrectly. I really know that now and I realize that. And the thing is that there are thousands of students, I guess, that apply to the Yale School of Drama every year. And in the design department, I guess there are like hundreds of people who apply, and they take only eight to eleven students for the design department every year. So those of us who were chosen, I think there was—my class was probably the first that was very large. He took three of us who were painters and one woman who was basically a kind of crafts—she worked with puppets. She'd lived in Israel for ten years. And then two of us who were painters, really full-time painters, and more so than other people who were actually graphic artists and designers already. So we were experiments which expanded the class probably from eight to eleven. But it was really rough, because the first assignment, we went walking in with these real rough, fleshy, kind of rough drawings, and of course we got torn apart immediately. It's like every day was being torn apart. And the words that everybody knows is like daily humiliation and low self-esteem by the time you get out of there. And it's especially hard if you are a student of color, because the aesthetic, of course, is a European aesthetic. Even with Ming teaching there and Ming knowing and Ming being frustrated—because I don't think he's ever received all the due credit or rewards that he should, except maybe through his students. But even Ming has had to fight a lot of the racism. I know, even though he doesn't want to talk about it so much, that goes on in having to deal in the arts—you know, a western European kind of an environment. But he was hard. He was hard. I spent three years in tears and three years of being in stress. And then my mother was having some really terrible experiences with her house, and losing her house in the middle of it all, and ended up coming to live with us in the midstream. That was all terribly stressful. Also not being able to provide—here my son was finally in his last years of high school. And of course, he raised his own money for his prom. It's like his first date was very expensive—$500 to rent a limousine and to rent tuxedos. I had no money to help him. He worked, and he earned all that. They also took a trip to the Bahamas for which he earned all that money on his own without me being able to help. Basically I was making $22.50 a week as work study money. I had a huge fellowship. Basically all the education part was paid for through the university, through all the fellowships I had, and then the student loans were supposed to cover our living expenses. But by the time you get the money, it's all spent, and it's all gone, and there's really nothing left except your work study money to live on. And at Yale, in this school of drama, it's about people's talents. It's probably one of the few places where basically you are accepted because you have potential for talent. And almost everybody in the school—there's about 199 to 200 students in the total drama school—that' s actors, administrators, technicians, everybody. Almost everyone there is on fellowship. Because we are not allowed to work outside of the school. The students work to run Yale Rep[ertory Theatre] and the University Theatre. So any work that you do outside the school is really illegal unless you've gotten special permission to do it. My third year I had to get special permission to do a play that I would be paid for. Everybody knew I needed the money desperately, otherwise I wouldn't have been given permission by the dean of the school.

MASON:: How long does it take before they have you working on Yale productions?

JACKSON:: You start immediately.

MASON:: Right away.

JACKSON:: You start working as an assistant and as an apprentice. And you're expected to get all of your assignments—the first year is extremely rough, because you're being an assistant. You're assisting maybe in two or three shows, you're doing underground productions, you're trying to get your assignments done. You're doing sets, lighting, and costume assignments for classes that run all day and all night. You learn not to sleep. And you want to work on student productions with other directors. Part of getting to work with people professionally at the school is how sometimes you make connections for after school. So far I really haven't used a lot of connections through my classmates in school. I've been working just by sending out my resume when I finally graduated. And I was persistent. They made me sit at the drafting table the last year. I didn't do a production. Everybody thought I would be getting the August Wilson production to design, and it turned out they gave it to one of my classmates. They gave her both the black plays to do.

MASON:: Well, you did work on it in some fashion, The Piano Lesson.

JACKSON:: The Piano Lesson was my first or second year there. The last play that was done in my senior year was Two Trains Running. That's the one that just got to Broadway. It takes about a two-year process for the plays to get from Yale, and then they tour the country. The ones especially that August Wilson has written, they start at Yale, they go around the country, where he rewrites the play throughout—I saw The Piano Lesson in Los Angeles, and then I saw it again—no, I saw at Yale and worked on it, just dressing the floors and put the dirt in the kitchen. The big joke is I would say, "That dirt in the kitchen is my dirt"—you know, your little claim to fame when you work on a show like that. And then it went through Los Angeles and went through Washington, D.C. I saw a rehearsal before it went to Washington, and it was incredible because of the changes where he'd rewritten the play. And then when I saw it when it finally got to Broadway, where the ending was resolved, was just incredible. The traveling around and then working in the process—it's the same kind of process that painters and poets go through; you rewrite and you rework, you repaint, you paint over. You sort of search and destroy within the painting or the poetry and you wipe out a lot of things that most people might think, "Well, that's great." You wipe it out because it doesn't work for the total piece. So that process is really incredible to see. The same thing happens with theater working. It's just like the piece I just finished working on, Macbeth. I worked with an incredible director, Charlie [Charles] Newell, who from the very beginning—because he and I started in New York in March. We met there and started talking through the play and going through research and ideas. And he's extremely sensitive to the total process. Again, working in theater is very similar to me to painting, where it's the process that's very important. We worked from March, telephone calls and drawings going back and forth and meeting here in Oakland, and then finally going into the shop and working on the play with the crew that I had, which was very fortunate. I had an incredible crew of cutters and stitchers. Everything that I asked for and what I drew they were able to make happen and to build it. It's such an incredible thrill to have that happen. Now, in my previous experience, I've had to do everything. For example, I worked in the Oakland Ensemble Theater on this last show, the Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, and I ended up having to do the shopping, having to sew and build all by myself, having to dip and dye. There was nobody as an assistant. There was no costume shop, because Oakland Ensemble Theater has been in transition out of the theater. The Alice Theater was in the [Bay Area] earthquake [of October 1989], and they've been rebuilding it. But basically I had to do everything myself.

MASON:: How long did that take you? It's hard to imagine.

JACKSON:: Well, you have a month, or you have about three weeks to do all of that and to build a show and to put it all together. This last show, Macbeth, we had at least six weeks to build the show, but of course, the process being longer than most in the sense that we were able to talk. Usually you have three weeks to sort of—maybe two weeks, two to three weeks when you are hired. You talk through with the director, you finally all get together, you do the drawings, you meet with the crew, and then you start building and shopping the show. But for example, in Europe—and Charlie's used to working in Europe—you have maybe six months to do a show, which is more like an artist functioning and painting. So this time I was able to function more as an artist in theater as opposed to being a shopper, costumer, you know, sweat work kind of person doing a show. When I worked in Los Angeles on two shows there I had a cast of sixty people. Fortunately, [I was] able to work on Fly Blackbird again. That's the show that I was talking about that started a lot of this stuff. I worked with Ray Taliafero when I was nineteen.

MASON:: Yeah, yeah.

JACKSON:: Well, this year I was able to work on Fly Blackbird again with C. Bernard Jackson. I had not known in all the years that I lived in Los Angeles that he was the man who wrote the music for Fly Blackbird. So for me, working with him at the beginning of the year was an incredible experience, because—

MASON:: He's at the Inner City Cultural Center.

JACKSON:: He is the artistic director at Inner City Cultural Center. But he's got to be the fundraiser, he is the everything there. And what I realized about him was that he's a brilliant man, he's brilliant! And he's not used as he should be used. I mean, he knows music. He was so gentle with the students there. Those students—in a sense they have a faculty that was kind of abusive to them, and whenever C. Bernard walked in they were so happy to see him. These students just turned all around and became these incredible performers whenever he walked in the room. But the fact that I saw him in a work that changed my perspective politically when I was nineteen, to see these kids at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen working on the same piece, which is still relevant today, which is about social change and about people having to be involved in the process of social change—it was considered a very revolutionary play at the time that it happened. It's still relevant. And the music was beautiful. It's an incredibly beautiful piece. So that was kind of wonderful, but I did the whole thing by myself—sixty costumes, having to shop them, pull them, do alterations, and absolutely no one to help. So I was kind of exhausted by the time I finally got up here. And then going back East and working on that show, it's like one right after the other. I ran into Ming on the train when I was going back last fall to work, and he was sort of shocked to see me. I was getting off the airplane, onto the train, and about to catch a cab and take clothes in a big suitcase to work, and he was sort of amazed. They had paid my way back and all my expenses to come back there. So I think that even though—because I was older and because I'd gone through all this sort of stress and trauma while I was there as a student, I don't think that they really thought that I was seriously going to be out there and continuing. But I made too much of an investment in my life. I lost a lot of my artwork. I lost all the last of my furniture as a result of going to Yale, it just being a financial disaster. And also in a sense losing myself, or having to reassure myself quite often, because people there—I mean, most of the students that I was there with were in their early twenties to late twenties, and they didn't know that—I was just another student there. Some of them didn't know I was as old as I was until they met my son, and then they—what I realized was the cultural or the generational difference, where I could make references to history—I had more in common with my instructors. Although because I was there, they were my instructors, so they were not my peers. They would be my peers in any other situation. But because I was a student there and having to learn drafting—I'd never learned drafting. And what I realized was that in my generation, coming up as a young woman going into art school and studying art, that many opportunities were not available to women. Although women had been in art classes in the nineteenth century, what women are given in art school is just the sort of—there is the sort of patronizing approach to women in art school. "Well, they'll come in. They're doing this as just a little thing to learn. They're not really serious about it, because they are going to go off and get married anyway." When I was at San Francisco State, they usually took about six people into graduate school. There was one woman, the sculptor that I was talking about earlier, I think, about her using a catalyst and the reactor in order to put through—she got into graduate school. But their expectation was that women were supposed to get married and go have babies. You weren't going to become an artist; that was a ridiculous thing. Even though there was Joan Brown. There were a number of women who were artists around. But there is this sort of male attitude that women were just vehicles for their own pleasure if they were there in the arts.

MASON:: Well, even other women have that attitude, women who have a more lesbian feminist perspective. They don't take heterosexual women seriously because they think the same thing: "Well, you are going to have a family, and you are going to deal with men, so how can you be creative?"

JACKSON:: Exactly.

MASON:: "How will you have time to think about things?"

JACKSON:: Yeah. But, you know, someone like Betye Saar is a perfect example. Betye is one of the people who had told Senga Ngudi and some of those, "You've got to raise your children first, and then you can really deal with your art full-time. You have to realize that there is only a certain amount you can do while you're raising those children." I'm one of those people who sort of persisted. It was like for me the advantage was being able to stay at home and take care of Rafiki and do my painting. It was harder when he became older, because older kids have different needs. When they're babies you can give them a carrot and a string bean, even though Rafiki had always had a ravenous appetite. But there are just more things that have to be made available for them because they're becoming adults, and they have a socialization process they could go through. But I think people are being surprised. And then the surprise was that Ming Cho Lee nominated me for a Theater Communications [Group] Directory of Designers of Color.

MASON:: I'm sorry, for what?

JACKSON:: Designers of Color. They put out—Theater Communications is like a theater communications group of all the theaters like LORT [League of Resident Theaters] theaters, regional theaters, all over the country that sort of band together in a way to sort of know and communicate with each other to know who artists and directors and—kind of a networking of theaters around the country so people know what's going on. And they published this year, I guess through the request some of the artistic directors and directors, kind of a publication that let people know who the directors, choreographers, designers are, who are Asian, Hispanic, black—

MASON:: I see. Native Americans—?

JACKSON:: Yeah, Native Americans—I don't know whether there were any Native Americans. I don't know if there were any Native Americans in there except, you know, like me as a partly one and somebody else who might be a part one, some to the black people. And then that was sent out to artistic directors and directors across the country. And I, of course, have received two calls, one from Bill Rauch at Cornerstone Theater [Company] and one from San Diego Rep[ertory Theater]. They asked me to do Spunk. and I'm not sure I want to do that. It's like just because I'm a black designer doesn't mean that I always have to do a black play. Other people have been more risk-taking in the sense that they look at my resume and they see that I have done all kinds of things—

MASON:: Yeah, you have everything on here, Shakespeare, you have Pericles, you have Antigone, also a play that I've never heard of, A Parenthetical Glance at the Dialectical Nature of the African American's Quest for Autonomy. [laughs]

JACKSON:: Yes. That was in my—wait a minute. Who wrote that play? That's written by Lynn Nottage. And Lynn, I'm really curious where she is, because she is an incredible playwright. She also wrote Santa Bernadisa. which was a play about the slave revolt in Cuba in the nineteenth century. And of course, she as a playwright was not taken seriously at Yale, even. She sort of graduated, and it seems like she disappeared. Other playwrights like Sam Kelly, who I did Skeletons and some other plays with, you know, I see Sam's name all over the place. It's the male and female difference. He's a black playwright. Walter Allen Bennett Jr. is another black playwright. Their works are taken seriously. Lynn just sort of disappeared. Beverly Smith Dawson was a woman who was a director who did a black version of Medea the first year I was there, and I worked on it as a scenic artist. Everybody, all the white people, of course, hated her Medea because it had rap and rock and a black Medea and a mixed cast. And of course, it was the opposite thing, where white people got to be included as the crossover or the multicultural mix.

MASON:: Yeah, I see. [laughs]

JACKSON:: As opposed to the other way around, where they add black people and they say, "Oh, well, it does matter that she's being Medea." That "No, this one normally would be a white person." So everybody hated her Medea. But it was like conceptually what she'd do with it, even though she tried to include so many things—I mean, it was an intense kind of a piece to do. Now she, I believe, has started a production company with her husband in New York [Stormy Weather Productions], because she'd sent me a letter asking me if I'd like to design for it, but I'm here. But it's really hard. Even the woman that I worked on the film with, Crystal Emery, who has struggled across country on crutches and in her little mobile cart trying to get—she's going through so many changes. It's like women trying to do the same things that men do are not taken seriously, or nobody wants to fund them, or nobody wants—it's like the hard struggle to try to do the same things. So an artist like Julie Dash being able to get her film [Daughters of the Dust] out there, it's incredible that she's been able to do that. It's like as women you work ten times harder and you get paid less to do the same thing and more. It's constantly having to prove that you can do what you do. Every time I go to work at a new theater there's always this atmosphere around me. I know it. It's like, "Is she going to prove that she can do what she can do?" Although they've checked my references. The artistic director knows I'm very organized, and everybody that I've worked with really likes my work. But I don't care. It doesn't make any difference. I'm going to keep a standard, and that standard is to keep the people who are used to doing sloppy and mediocre work on their toes. Because there's just a lot of—and part of my going back to Yale was because I was seeing a lot of mediocrity, I thought. And there still is a lot of mediocrity in everything that people do out there. And I really wanted to be challenged by something else. I wanted to learn some skills that I didn't get when I was younger. Because I wasn't taught those things, because you didn't teach them to girls. I learned to draft. I took drafting class two years in a row because the first year I was too busy to just be able to really concentrate and finish the drafting I had to do. It was a new concept for me. And of course, Ming gave us some real hard drafting to do. He and Bill [William B.] Warfel sort of co-teach the class together. We had to draft from an eighth-inch scale up to a half-inch scale. And you can really get the drafting completely off on a whole unit on a set. It's like it was halfway over on the wrong side of the page. I had to stop and start all over again and do it. But doing it two years in a row, taking the drafting class, by the time I finished I loved drafting. And the line quality—it's like you do these beautiful drawings when you're really drafting. So that was something that was a challenge for me, because it was something I had never done. As a dancer—dancers go to rehearsal in the studio, dancers appear on stage, and you know that there are wings and that there are booms in the wings, and that's all you ever know. And at Yale the experience was to take apart the whole theater. When they have winterfest, as crew there are some nights that when the performance is over at eleven o'clock at night or ten thirty, and then you take down the whole theater, so you finish at seven thirty in the morning. And you had better be back up at nine o'clock for class, you know, eight or nine o'clock in class with your assignments done. That's just the way it was there. So there's a great deal of discipline. There's a great deal of learning how to work and not sleep and not eat. It was like three years of being in a seminary in a way. You know, it's graduate school. It's poverty, chastity, and celibacy. And then in the three-year period Arthur [Monroe] and I were sort of talking back and forth on the telephones and things and trying to keep that relationship together, you know, that's real hard. So everything is long distance, and it's not possible to do anything because you're always having to be ready, and you sort of lose touch with everybody and everything. It's the reason I didn't see—the only time I saw any art exhibitions on the East Coast was when I was out costume shopping and I bumped into Dan Concholar on the street at Houston [Street] and Broadway, and I couldn't believe it. I'm walking down the street with big shopping bags and there's this handsome man walking down the street, and I look, and I realize it's Dan Concholar. He was going into June Kelly Gallery. So he just sort of dragged me along, and we went upstairs to June Kelly Gallery, and I saw that exhibition. And then we went over to another. This is part of what Dan does now as the art information service, he has to go to exhibitions every night. And then we went to another exhibition of some white artists in a big space. There was hardly anybody there. It looked terribly expensive to put it all on, and it was a bunch of junk on the walls. So those were the only two exhibitions that I went to. And then Arthur had an exhibition last September. So I really have not even seen any shows.

MASON:: You were also saying that you were at Yale at the same time a lot of these young art historians were, like Sylvia Boone and Ric [Richard] Powell. And the other woman—I couldn't think of her name—was Judith Wilson, probably around the same time. You said you kind of saw them but you didn't know who they were, and they didn't know who you were either.

JACKSON:: It was really funny, because I was sitting—I was xeroxing at the Xerox machine in the graduate library, the art and architecture library—it's a famous place. It's like everybody is xeroxing like crazy doing research. And because you can't take any books out of the art and architecture library—and then there's a graduate study room, so those of us who are graduate students will go into that room, a lot of the art history students. That's basically the only place that I would see Larry. I don't remember Larry's last name, but he was kind of a French art history—I think seventeenth- or eighteenth-century art history major. And then this other black woman who was very intense looking and always looking into her work. But while I was standing at the Xerox machine xeroxing, this young student came through, and I don't know whether she was an undergrad or what, but she's sitting there holding open a book with my painting. And I think it was from that Forever Free: [Works by an African-American Woman Artist] catalog. She was sitting there holding this book open, and she's saying to me, "How long are you going to be at that Xerox machine? Would you please hurry up!" And I said, "I'll be finished in about five minutes." And I said, "By the way, that painting that you're holding open in your lap is my painting."

MASON:: And what did she say? [laughs]

JACKSON:: She said, "Oh." I couldn't help it. By that time I was just really—

MASON:: Yeah, everybody is really stressed.

JACKSON:: I was really very—it's like I normally wouldn't do a thing like that. And most people that—it's like a couple of my classmates—when Chrisi Karvanidis-[Duchenko] was designing Two Trains Running, August Wilson had told her about Romare Bearden. Now, this is really strange, because, of course, I knew Romare Bearden in person, and she had his work up in her studio. And she was asking me a few questions about some of these black artists and things, and I'd said, "Well, yes, I knew Romare Bearden," and she almost fell on the floor. And then she went through doing some more research, and she found the picture of me in Black Artists on Art and almost fell over again because she didn't realize—because it doesn't look like me, either. I said, "I think it was one of those photos I had done for theater." So I have these eyelashes, and I had a big Afro, which we had to pound and pat to get me to get this big Afro. So it's a really funny-looking photograph that was in that book. So they were cracking up. They'd sort of pass it, I think, amongst them and looked at it and couldn't believe it was me, right? Especially because the book was I guess published before some of them were even in high school, maybe, or out of high school. But anyway, the experience was basically that all of us were just so—it's like any of the black students there, you kind of say "hi" and you give recognition, and the only time that you have to meet other people is at—the last year I was there they had a graduate reception in the Afro-American Studies Center. The way it is is that the drama school is a complex between York Street and Park Street. There's a pathway and kind of garden that you go through, and in that pathway and garden there's the [African and] Afro-American Studies Center. And across from that is the Cabaret, which is the underground theater that the students sort of run for Yale. And then you go through that out to the street, and you go over to the design department. Sometimes when I'd be in the design studio you'd hear the drums, there would be some drummers playing in the Afro-American center. So it would be kind of wonderful, but never time to even walk in that door in order to do anything. So my last year there was a reception, and that's when I was able to meet some students from South Africa, a poet who was actually in the drama department, a playwright, Paul, and I met some other people at that time. But it was the first time in three years that I'd been able to meet any other students and get to know very many people. [tape recorder off] Even at that, it's like the one friend that I had that sort of intellectually and, you know, kind of conversations about politics and art, was Ramon Flores, who was the director that I worked with. He lives in Albuquerque. And Ramon, being a Chicano, and me being—Ramon I guess graduated from Stanford [University] and went to Yale. I think he tends to be more conservative, but—and he was very masculine. It's like that understanding. He was describing to me about how men love war and fighting. It's that warrior image. So we'd have all these big discussions about that and the differences in cultures and the similarities in cultures of color. So basically that was one of the few intellectual sort of connections I had there while I was at Yale as far as a camaraderie. Toward the end of my time there they were beginning to take in more older students, people in their mid-forties. I think maybe they realized that those of us who are older have more mature life experience and bring a different kind of experience to graduate school as opposed to the students who are really young and also aesthetically and historically don't understand what the process is. The younger students tend to want assignments and want to be told what to do, and the older students tend to take the initiative and make projects for themselves and also are more flexible as far as their attitude toward what the work is without expecting that they're doing it only because they're going to have a job when they get out. We all sort of had the realization that it's not like that.

MASON:: Did you have a particular kind of play that you liked to work on, since you did work in so many areas, from ancient to Shakespearian to modern? Is there any particular—? Does it depend on the director or—?

JACKSON:: No, what happened there is that usually the plays in the Rep[ertory Theatre] or in the University Theatre, where we were given assignments for the professional theater pieces, for the university pieces that were perhaps the thesis—unless a director, a master's director, might ask for you. For example, Ann D'Zmura requested that I would work with her on her thesis project because we had done the Lynn Nottage plays together. For the final assignment we were given that. I worked with Dave [David J.] DeRose in theater studies, and his plays were basically historical plays, because they were with undergrads. And then in the Cabaret theater we usually worked on experimental plays, sometimes new plays, contemporary plays, whatever a person wanted to do, or musical reviews. So it could be a combination of everything. And it was just sort of fun to work with different directors. It's still that way with me. I like—and now, for example, I really like the challenge of—it could be the same old play, but if a director has another concept, one that is amiable to the designer also helping to develop the concept—which was the way I worked just recently with Charlie Newell, where basically the designers, the director, everybody, worked together. Even the staff and crew, if they had an idea, a creative idea to add to whatever the design was, we were kind of all flexible and open so that we really worked cooperatively. The difference in working in theater and working in the studio as a painter is that it's a cooperative and a family effort. People work together on ideas to create something as opposed to the artist working in the studio alone on something that is her own. I mean, the reason I stopped dancing in a way was not only because I had a son but also because I didn't really want to do anybody else's choreography anymore. When I started doing choreography myself, then I really enjoyed the process of working in dance, and writing the music that goes with the choreography, which is kind of fun too.

MASON:: So how would you say that your drama school experience has influenced your art? Either the way you produce it or—?

JACKSON:: Well, the reality is that as a result of going back to school I lost everything that I owned—all the valuable art collection, the antique furniture, a lot of my books, a lot of my records—because I was just so financially strapped. Initially I would have been okay according to the fellowships they were giving me and everything, the way it was lined up, but some things just happened that were traumatic in our family that just set me back, and so I lost everything. And as a result of losing everything, including ray paintings, all my art supplies, my records, my books, it means that I have less. I have nothing. I start from nothing. And I have a totally different concept. I have no desire to have a lot of the material things that I had before, because I cannot even replace what I had before. I look now at some of the same things that I had, and they're financially out of my even owning them anymore. And what I see doesn't even have the same quality of what I had before. Those things that were pleasurable and beautiful that I kept around me—I didn't pay a lot of money for them. It's just that I found them or I got them inexpensively. The only thing that I miss and I regret was some of the books I lost and some of the records. But it just means starting new and living very simply. I have no desire for clothes and furniture. I just want some more bookcases that I could build or get cheaply at St. Vincent de Paul. I only need what I need to work. I want art supplies, and that's all I care about at this point. There's public transportation to get from one place to the next. I've never had that much luck with automobiles. It would be great to have one for the times that I have to work in theater, but I just don't think that's a priority right now.

MASON:: Okay. The last thing I wanted to ask is how you felt about the interview, how you felt about being interviewed. You don't have to say anything nice, [laughs]

JACKSON:: No, no it's been really positive. Because basically I think—for example, just rearranging all those journals in that corner and making my little desk out of my post boxes was really good, because—[tape recorder off]

MASON:: You were talking about being able to get organized.

JACKSON:: Oh, yeah. Because I moved into the studio. I rented the studio in April, and I had to leave immediately. I just came up here and paid the money and left and went back East to work on a show, and then I came back in May and worked on Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl. And then I was here thinking I'd have time, and I was drawing the show for Macbeth and then working on Macbeth. So I just took the books out of the boxes, stuffed them on the shelf, and I was just in here, so I haven't had a chance to really make a relationship to the visual art part of me and reorganizing it. Also the journal part and writing. And I haven't written that much since I've been here. While I was on the road and in trains I could always—it's great on trains and buses, because then I can write a bit. And I keep the journals. So now just reorganizing this. Then also just sort of looking at what I've done has been kind of interesting. Even though I will be interested to hear or see what's there, because then it seems like there are other places to fill in that I probably will fill in in whatever I write. This next book that I have been trying to write since 1978, that was whatever it is that's going to happen from my next book, whatever that will be—I always think that I'm going to write a novel, and I start editing it and it becomes poetry. No, I think that's what's been good for me, just to sort of relax these few days and not do anything else except that and paint a little bit.

MASON:: Okay. So we'll end there. Thank you.

JACKSON:: Oh, you're welcome.

A TEI Project

Interview of Suzanne Jackson

Table of contents

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1992

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO AUGUST 12, 1992

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE AUGUST 12, 1992

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1992

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1992

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1992

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1992

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE AUGUST 14, 1992

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO AUGUST 14, 1992

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE AUGUST 14, 1992

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 15, 1992

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO AUGUST 15, 1992

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 15, 1992

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE AUGUST 16, 1992

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO AUGUST 16, 1992