Marcus Jackson
Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices
October 13 - December 31, 2023
Exhibition Reception & Poetry Reading: October 20 @ 6:30 p.m.
Marcus Jackson is a widely published photographer and writer who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University. Marcus specializes in portraiture made on location with mostly natural or available light, and he works in both film and digital formats. His photographs portray the organic beauty and complexity of people and places. All photographs were made in Columbus, Ohio or in New York City, during the years 2020 and 2021. This collection title is inspired by Robert Hayden's indelible poem "Those Winter Sundays," whose final lines read:
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Marcus Jackson is a poet and photographer who studied in NYU’s graduate creative writing program and as a Cave Canem fellow. His poems and photographs have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. His second book of poems, entitled Pardon My Heart (Northwestern University Press/TriQuarterly Books), was released in 2018. Of Pardon My Heart, Jeff Gordinier for The New York Times writes, “Jackson's collection confirms the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American poetry, one whose writing, on page after page, has the fullness and glow of a jubilee.” Jackson’s forthcoming photography monograph of street portraits is slated for publication in 2024. Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio, and he teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State.
Change Gone Come
Sketching beside a March
Family for Black Lives Matter
Fist Held to Chest in Protest
Consolation
Keep Your Knee
34th Street Lean
High Street Shake
Person Saluting outside Statehouse
What Now
Two Generations outside Barbershop
Contractor with Crossed Arms
Bus Stop at King and High
Stage of Propagation
Grandparent holding Grandchild
ARTIST STATEMENT
Making a poem or a photograph involves finding ways in which a fixed frame or a chosen poetic form can house the complex intersections between light and shadow, stillness and movement, proximity and distance, the solitary and the civic, mortality and the metamorphosis of time. Being African American can mean traversing the crossroads between history’s severities and the future’s indeterminate pliability.
As an African American poet and photographer, I prioritize making space for the moments and the people whose essences represent the ongoing interplay between history, society, and the individual soul. While creating poems and portraits, I invite the resonant exchanges among social circumstances and private consciousness and emotion.
Since 2020, because of—among other conditions and events—the pandemic’s highlighting of economic and healthcare inequities, and continued violence by police against unarmed BIPOC community members, the dynamics of communal and personal existence for Black and Brown people have intensified, revealing new challenges and depths to our grief and our brilliance. In my poetry and my photography, I am attempting to portray the unfolding nuances of people’s insistence on truth and beauty.
This exhibit is made possible with the generous support of the UI Creative Writing Program, English Department, and Africana Studies, as well as our many generous donors. Program sponsors include: Bennett Lumber Products Inc., Rootforest LLC, City of Moscow ARPA Funds, a grant form the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Barbara Wells, Jaki Wright, Skinner Family Foundation, Prudy & Dick Heimsch, Moscow Realty, and NRS.