Suzanne Jackson, whose work a history drawing-cracked wall (2016–19) features on the cover of the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America in a detail of the larger work shown here in full, told A.i.A. the backstory of her creation from her home in Savannah, Georgia. (Jackson is also the subject of a feature profile in the same issue.)
As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life.
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For me, drawing is easy. I love it. It’s a calming therapy, a spiritual connection. I was really having a good time drawing this. You sometimes hear people say, “Oh, people who make abstract paintings do it because they can’t draw.” I think the opposite is true: for people who can draw, drawing is an easy thing—it’s something traditional and expected. People expect realism, and they enjoy it, because it’s the pleasure of seeing something recognizable. But every element in this drawing is an abstraction, even the things that are supposedly recognizable. I always play with things a little bit, stretch them and have fun with them. That’s just what the hand does. This piece is a little bumpy; it is not supposed to sit flat on the wall. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of perfection. Ever since I left art school, it’s been about adjusting the rules of art, taking the fundamentals and stretching them into something more exciting. Finding another kind of beauty.
My body was going through a lot of changes, becoming fuller, and I was thinking about how a woman’s body becomes “out of shape,” but is also very powerful, and aggressive. It really had to do with women pushing through all this stuff that we have to do. But then also how women get taken for granted: we are not supposed to have knowledge, or power, or intelligence. Or take risks, do things that are new or innovative. I was also thinking about women having been medics, herbalists, the ones who brought babies into the world, and how that was taken away from us by modern medicine, which doesn’t have a clue about our bodies.
I was having such a good time [drawing the] animals and insects. I used to collect all these bugs and things that would fall on the ground or come into the studio. I think about the big palmetto bugs that I first saw in 1966 when I was in Venezuela on tour with a dance troupe, staying in the Guadalajara Hilton—we called it the Guadala-Hilton. When I moved to Savannah, I saw palmetto bugs again. They still fascinate me. The cats won’t eat them because they are so nasty.
There are parts of environments sneaking in: a little oasis of palm trees and some roots of something else. The cat is based on one of my kitties. And there is a polar bear just above the larger head—you have to look for it. There are birds. There is so much in this earth environment that we still don’t know. So much of nature is disappearing. I think I was putting as many disappearing things as I could into this drawing. I’m still fascinated by nature, like when I was a child and would walk through a garden and everything was bigger than me. I still love that idea.