Modern Arts Museum Houston Presents a Mid-Profession Survey of Artist Tomashi Jackson

It’s been a decade since Tomashi Jackson final visited Houston.

The artist, who has garnered appreciable essential acclaim and an exhibition at New York Metropolis’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Artwork Biennial, lived within the Bayou Metropolis throughout a 2015 residency at Undertaking Row Homes. However they’re nonetheless, technically talking, a Houstonian. Born in Third Ward, Jackson was adopted by their maternal aunt Aver M. Burroughs (whom they contemplate their mom) and relocated to Los Angeles as an toddler. Houston by no means left their thoughts, nevertheless. They at all times questioned what awaited them right here in the event that they ever returned.

“What was Houston like?” Jackson recollects pondering. “There’s simply a lot that I didn’t know as an adoptee…and there’s a lot that the adults simply couldn’t inform me [because] I used to be too younger to grasp.”

The daring multimedia artist is again once more, and now the focus of a good looking, bittersweet homecoming at Modern Arts Museum Houston. Open by March 29, 2026, Tomashi Jackson: Throughout the Universe, offers a vibrant, chronological survey of the previous decade of their work; a group of video, textiles, blended media, work, pictures, and sculpture merge to light up problems with under- or misreported tales of the Black group, mortality, loss, and find out how to course of all of the ensuing emotional complexities.

Vibrating Boundaries (Legislation of the Land) (Self Portrait as Tatyana, Dajerria, and Sandra), for instance, entails a frenetic video collage. Footage of the 2015 McKinney pool social gathering, an incident the place police swarmed and aggressively detained a gaggle of Black teenagers swimming at a group pool, is layered over a clip of the visitors cease that led to the arrest and eventual loss of life of Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas. Jackson then overlays these photographs with photographs of native artists Emily Peacock and Patrick Renner, posed in the identical aggressive stance because the officers within the referenced violence. Alongside the 2, Jackson mirrors the weak positions of Bland and the McKinney teenagers as a gesture of empathy. The grim reenactments between sufferer and victimizer have been all staged within the sweltering yard of Undertaking Row Homes—an icon of Third Ward, and the identical neighborhood the place Jackson’s organic mom grew up.

Jackson felt a profound connection to all of it. The McKinney pool social gathering and Sandra Bland’s arrest occurred across the identical time the artist was scheduled to go to their Texas residence for the primary time as an grownup. Feeling unsafe, they modified their itinerary, staying throughout the higher Houston space all through their Undertaking Row Homes residency as a substitute of touring throughout East Texas to review college segregation as initially deliberate. Nonetheless, they are saying that such work has helped them function a witness to victims’ ache and violation and to protect all of it by artwork. They ask the identical of viewers by extension.

“That’s actually been the story of my life,” Jackson says. “To be guided by this compulsion to see and to make and to share issues which might be seen.”

Comparable ideas are at play in 2018’s Interstate Love Tune (Buddies of Clayton County Transit) (Pitts Highway Station Opposition), a mixed-media piece that includes a discarded awning loaded down with silkscreened pictures, mylar strips, and magenta and vermilion inks. This work illustrates how racist laws and metropolis planning make public transportation much less accessible in majority Black neighborhoods, particularly Clayton County, Georgia. Photos of the Buddies of Clayton County Transit’s 2014 marketing campaign to develop the Metropolitan Atlanta Speedy Transit Authority (MARTA) are displayed in vermilion, whereas pictures of white protesters in 1981, demanding a reversal of plans to open a transit line alongside Pitts Highway in close by Cobb County, are proven in magenta.

“The narratives that I sought to discover have been narratives of self-possession, pleasure, self-determination,” they are saying. “How have folks in a hostile setting congregated to self-determine, to create pleasure, to create security?”

Jackson’s most up-to-date works, created through the COVID-19 pandemic and whereas touring by Colorado, proceed the themes of uplifting uncared for historical past and the intersections of group and private grief. It additionally marks an additional exploration into utilizing efficiency and sound parts to convey complicated feelings. A number of works infuse musical parts, paying homage to a pillar of Jackson’s relationship with Burroughs: Within the multimedia collage Minute By Minute (Juneteenth in 5 Factors Denver, CO 2023 / Leaves Research by my Mom in COVID Isolation in Bakersfield, CA 2020)—impressed by the Doobie Brothers’ titular album of the (virtually) identical identify—Jackson delivers a sonic expertise incorporating a recording of their mom narrating their household’s historical past of migration from White Rock, Texas, to Southern California. Alongside this oral historical past performs tracks from Minute by Minute—a favourite between mom and youngster.

Displaced by the skyrocketing price of residing, Burroughs moved from LA to Bakersfield, California. She subsequently died in isolation through the COVID-19 pandemic. Minute By Minute consists of the final 10 pictures she snapped earlier than her passing.  

“I’m interested by how, if we keep alive lengthy sufficient, we’re more likely to outlive our mother and father. I simply didn’t count on it to be so quickly,” Jackson says. “If we stay lengthy sufficient, we additionally get alternatives to study extra about histories which were…suppressed as a result of de jure and de facto insurance policies of segregation.”

In a video sequence enjoying within the CAMH’s darkish theater house, Jackson pays one other tribute to their mom; this time, donning the graceful drag king persona of Tommy Tonight, a touring musician from the fictional ’90s-style boy band D’TALENTZ. The suave candy talker lip-syncs to songs expensive to each the artist and their late mom. To Jackson, Tommy isn’t a riot towards anti-drag and in any other case transphobic invoice proposals—actually, the character predates even the proposal of such laws. Fairly, he acts as a “container” for the agonies and ecstasies of their deep sense of loss.

Though the present usually grapples with private, generational, and communal trauma, Throughout the Universe stays grounded in love. For household, for group, and for the self. In triumph and grief. In oppression and solidarity. In historical past, geography, politics, and past. All of Jackson’s works yield new observations upon subsequent viewings. Each piece within the survey might come accompanied by a complete bibliography, enriched as they’re by Jackson’s impassioned boots-on-the-ground analysis.

“A whole lot of horrible, unhappy issues proceed to occur, however these of us who proceed to stay and search good in each other, that is what we’d have the ability to see,” they are saying. “We’d have the ability to see issues on a monumental scale that we by no means knew existed.”

Editor’s observe: This text has been written to mirror artist Tomashi Jackson’s most well-liked pronouns (she/they).