Value in Hu(e)manity: Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe

MICHAEL MCFADDEN·
HoustonVisual Art
·

A canopy juts from the museum wall, marine vinyl and Mylar streaming in colored strips, casting shadows in red, yellow, and green. Beneath it, stretched across fabric and pigment and fragments of lived history, a portrait emerges, not fixed but refracted, flickering in motion as the viewer moves.

This is how Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe, on view at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through March 29, 2026, begins—or how it continues.

Organized by curator Miranda Lash and curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston by Ryan N. Dennis, the exhibition is a mid-career survey, but it resists the sense of completion the title suggests. The exhibition charts Jackson’s expansive, shape-shifting practice, one that spans painting, fiber, print, video, sculpture, and sound. Each work points outward to others, each question leads to a dozen more. Rather than look back, Jackson opens up.

Her practice is research-driven, but not in the detached academic sense. Her research is lived, accumulated through conversations on street corners and in clubs, over kitchen tables and in public archives.

“Before I had an understanding of research practices, I always had a lot of questions about why things are the way they are,” Jackson said. That questioning began early, sharpened through community, travel, and formal study but remains deeply instinctual.

“If a research methodology is grounded in integrity,” she learned from a friend, “the outcome will be trustworthy.”

For Jackson, the questions have always mattered more than the answers. What is a painting? What is a sculpture? Can color carry memory? Can sound carry grief? Can emotion reshape space?

The work in Across the Universe approaches these questions through vibrant, tactile forms. Many of Jackson’s recent paintings are mounted on structures that echo the awnings of pre-gentrification New York, those shaded extensions of architecture that offered shelter, signage, and sculptural gesture all at once.

She remembers them as functional fixtures in a city before its face was sanded down and re-skinned with glass. Awnings, in Jackson’s work, form a symbol for protection, for community, for resistance built into the bones of buildings.

“I have a natural appreciation of buildings, shared space, and functional architecture,” she said. Her mother, an operating engineer, helped keep buildings breathing, “working with people to make buildings work.”

Here, the structures are reimagined through vinyl and canvas, printed with halftone images of civil rights organizers, domestic workers, schoolchildren, and policy documents. Chromatic overlays complicate and deepen the figures, forcing the eye to navigate illusion, interruption, and multiplicity. Her compositions pull from the visual language of color theory, but Jackson also reads color socially: hue as skin, as metaphor, as a shifting ground. “Color is social and color is chromatic,” she stated. “There is value in hue and value in humanity.”

Throughout the exhibition, color does double and triple duty. In some works, textiles function like brushstrokes stitched, wrapped, or suspended in ways that suggest both quilt and garment, both surface and shelter. In others, pigment and print dissolve into abstraction, evoking heat maps, constellations, or bruises. There’s a density to the surfaces, a material insistence on complexity. You can’t take them in at a glance. The paintings unfold as histories sedimented in layers of fabric, image, paper, and paint.

Jackson’s use of fabric, in particular, comes from a personal place. After grad school, unsure if she would paint again, she found herself drawn to fiber through the patient rhythms of older women who knit.

“They taught me how,” she recalled. “Once I was able to knit on my own, I was excited about introducing new colors into rows, imagining designs and how colors intermingle.” It was, she explained, a way back to joy. A way to see again.

That sensorial joy spills into her video and performance work, including the Tommy Tonight video series, which screens on a loop in the blackbox of the gallery. At first, Jackson thought of Tommy as an alter ego, a character to inhabit. Over time, she recognized it as part of the same practice, a place where memory, music, and persona could surface together.

“Music is memory,” she said. “It’s a container to hold emotions that aren’t to be shared nakedly wherever I am.” In the videos, her paintings move, sing, vibrate. The visual becomes auditory. The auditory becomes emotional. The loop turns kinetic.

Jackson’s approach to making is additive and interdisciplinary, but there’s nothing chaotic about it. Each piece carries a rigor and clarity born of attention – attention to materials, to place, to people. At the Parrish Art Museum, she collaborated with a research assistant to uncover local histories of Latinx and Indigenous communities on Long Island. At Yale, she buried herself in law library transcripts of school desegregation cases, reading for linguistic overlaps between legal definitions and color theory.

“One color can be made to look like two completely different colors and vice versa based on the color intersecting them,” she explained. In Jackson’s hands, this perceptual fact becomes a political one.

That’s the core of Across the Universe: the way material, memory, and governance shape human experience, not in abstraction, but on the skin, in the home, in the structures we move through and the policies we survive. Her surfaces are not merely aesthetic. They are sites of legislation. They hold the residue of redlining and school zoning, of resistance and protection.

There’s a generosity in the work, too. Jackson isn’t pointing to a closed meaning, but asking viewers to follow a thread. To walk alongside. “What I’m hearing is that people are hitting those questions,” she said. “Of color, sound, complex narrative, and emotion with a nucleus of light and figure.”

A strip of vinyl catches the light and casts a bright green shape across the floor. You follow it. You notice where it lands. And maybe that’s where the painting begins.

—MICHAEL McFADDEN

MICHAEL MCFADDEN

Michael McFadden is a Houston-based writer and arts administrator. He holds an MA in Arts Leadership from the University of Houston's College of the Arts and has worked extensively with the Houston arts community. Learn more about him at pugintheair.com.