Contemporary African-American figurative artist Stefanie Jackson is making sure Black History Month is seen and not just heard.
The Sonja Haynes Stone Center is hosting Jackson’s exhibit, "La Sombra y el Espiritu IV: Figurative Visions and Collective Histories — The Work of Stefanie Jackson," until May 13.
Jackson's work explores important events in U.S. and African-American history, including the Atlanta race riots and the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, said Joseph Jordan, the director of the Stone Center.
“Her work is figurative visions, because if you see her work, it’s really compelling in that way,” said Clarissa Goodlett, the program and public communications officer at the Stone Center. “It’s hard to describe these images unless you see them. There’s a lot happening in each painting.”
The exhibit is the fourth in a series entitled "La Sombra y el Espiritu."
Jordan said Jackson's art will provide an opportunity to see how the concepts of shadow and spirit relate to African-American lives and experiences, and sought her out due to her prominence as an artist and the issues her work addresses.
“Hopefully they will engage and ask the kind of questions that most likely will be raised once they experience the images,” Jordan said.
Jackson said her paintings are a mixture of the reality of what she experiences and historical issues associated with each setting.
“Because the art is representational, people can respond to it more easily than if it was abstract,” she said. “With it being representational, people can look at the scene and try to figure it out and have fun with it a little bit.”
