What Is Love traces painter Suzanne Jackson’s (US, b. 1944) lifelong devotion to beauty as a political force. As the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist’s career, the exhibition spans six decades of work and highlights her evolving engagement with poetry, dance, and theater.

At the center of Jackson’s practice is a dedication to both the earthly and spiritual dimensions of love. Her joyful experimentations with color, light, and materiality refuse stereotypical notions of Blackness, insisting instead on complexity and tenderness. In her early figurative works, loose washes of acrylic paint reveal a reverence for memory and ancestral lineage. In later works, representational forms give way to abstraction. Textured layers of paper evoke ancient topographies, while luminous acrylic forms hang like dreams suspended midair. Guided by the notion that beauty is an act of care and a means of survival, Jackson’s work invites us to consider the very nature of love.

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.