Deborah Jack

Last updated

Deborah Jack
Born
Deborah Drisana Jack

1970 (age 53–54)
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Alma mater State University of New York at Buffalo (MFA, 2006)
Occupation(s)Visual artist and poet
Website deborahjack.com

Deborah Drisana Jack (born 1970) is a Caribbean visual artist and poet. Raised on the island of Saint Martin, her art is both conceptual and interdisciplinary, employing installation, photography, and film to explore various themes. She has published two poetry collections. Jack graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo and teaches art at New Jersey City University. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Jack was born in 1970 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She grew up in Sint Maarten, the Dutch half of the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean. [2]

In the 1990s, Jack worked in an art gallery and was among the founding partners of the Philipsburg-based AXUM. [3] She earned her MFA in 2002 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. [4]

Art career

Jack's art is conceptual, exploring themes related to the African diaspora, memory and time. Her works are multidisciplinary, using installation, photography, and film. She frequently uses motifs such as the ocean, salt, slavery, the Middle Passage, and Atlantic hurricanes. [2]

"To watch me film would be a performance. I am a very low-tech, low-fi creator, even with the digital tools. I would have the camera strapped to my hand and would choreograph a way to move through the trees so that you would think that you are going through some kind of experience. There is this dance performance that is happening to get a certain smoothness for me to know that if I am going to slow it down then I need to move at a certain speed." —Deborah Jack for BOMB Magazine , 24 February 2021. [5]

Salt plays a crucial role in much of Jack's work. Historically, salt mining in Saint Martin was accomplished through slave labour. Beginning in the early 2000s, Jack's art has incorporated salt as a motif, connecting members of the African diaspora through the ocean to their roots in Africa. For her 2002 Foremothers series, she used rock salt in portraits of her paternal grandmother. [2] [1]

Jack had a summer residency at Big Orbit Gallery in 2004 and her installation SHORE debuted there on 11 September. She layered the gallery floors with five tons of brown and white salt which visitors trod on. The installation employed a 40-foot by 20-foot reflecting pool at the edge of the floor and used projected video, sound, and nylon sails to evoke themes related to memory, the history of Saint Martin, slavery, and the Middle Passage. [6]

After a purchaser of one of the paintings from Jack's A/Salting Series informed her the artwork had been growing, she visited the painting to discover that it had been recently moved and a change in air moisture had caused new crystallization of the salts. [6]

Jack is considered an important poet from the Caribbean island of St. Martin, where her nom de plume is Drisana. The debut poetry collection, The Rainy Season by Drisana Deborah Jack, was published by House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP) in 1997. Her second book of verse, skin (2006), was also published by the Saint Martin (island) indie press. [4]

A 20-year retrospective of Jack's work, Deborah Jack: 20 Years, was held at Pen + Brush in 2021. [7] Jack gave the keynote address at the 2021 St. Martin Book Fair. [8] She also received the Presidents Award at the book fair. [9]

Jack holds an assistant professorship at New Jersey City University, where she teaches art. [4]

Deborah Jack's film fecund memories of sky and salt...the amnesia of a history unrehearsed, still lush... (2022) was acquired by the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, and exhibited in The Days That Build Us (2024), a show organized by PAMMTV, a video art streaming platform, at PAMM. [10]

Selected exhibitions

Public collections (selected)

Works

Poetry collections

Other books

(In which Deborah Jack is profiled and her poetry and/or art critiqued)

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saint Martin (island)</span> Small island in the Caribbean

Saint Martin is an island in Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles in the northeastern Caribbean, approximately 300 km (190 mi) east of Puerto Rico. The 87 km2 (34 sq mi) island is divided roughly 60:40 between the French Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the Dutch part is more populated than the French. Divided since 1648, the northern French part comprises the Collectivity of Saint Martin and is an overseas collectivity of the French Republic. The southern Dutch part comprises Sint Maarten and is one of four constituent countries that form the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Even though the island is an overseas possession of two European Union member states, only the French part of the island is part of the EU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morris Louis</span> American painter (1912-1962)

Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faith Ringgold</span> American artist (1930–2024)

Faith Ringgold was an American painter, author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amelia Peláez</span> Cuban painter

Amelia Peláez del Casal was an important Cuban painter of the Avant-garde generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edouard Duval-Carrié</span> Haitian-American painter

Edouard Duval-Carrié is a Haitian-born American contemporary painter and sculptor based in Miami, Florida.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pérez Art Museum Miami</span> Art museum in Miami, Florida

The Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)—officially known as the Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County—is a contemporary art museum that relocated in 2013 to the Maurice A. Ferré Park in Downtown Miami, Florida. Founded in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, it became known as the Miami Art Museum from 1996 until it was renamed in 2013 upon the opening of its new building designed by Herzog & de Meuron at 1103 Biscayne Boulevard. PAMM, along with the $275 million Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science and a city park which are being built in the area with completion in 2017, is part of the 20-acre Maurice A. Ferré Park.

Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist from Havana. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ebony Patterson</span> Jamaican-born visual artist and educator (born 1981)

Ebony Grace Patterson is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created out of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. Her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.

Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi-American-Swedish artist of Kurdish descent, who was born in Baghdad and fled to Sweden with family during the Gulf War, studied in Florence, and is currently based in Los Angeles. She is primarily a painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lasana M. Sekou</span> Saint Martin writer and publisher (born 1959)

Lasana M. Sekou is a poet, short story writer, essayist, journalist, and publisher from the Caribbean island of Saint Martin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xaviera Simmons</span> American contemporary artist (born 1974)

Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019 to 2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.

Nicole Cherubini is an American visual artist and sculptor working primarily in ceramics. She lives and works in New York.

Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antonia Wright</span> American installation artist (born 1979)

Antonia Wright is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Through a multidisciplinary practice of video, performance, installation, sculpture, sound, and light, Wright responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as they relate to systems of power in society. Alpesh Kantilal Patel of Artforum wrote of her work, “the body is the true medium she explores.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Firelei Báez</span> Dominican / American visual artist (born 1981)

Firelei Báez is a Dominican Republic-born, New York City-based artist known for intricate works on paper and canvas, as well as large scale sculpture. Her art focuses on untold stories and unheard voices, using portraiture, landscape, and design to explore the Western canon.

Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her works examine Afro-Cuban migration through the lens of material culture and personal experience. Valdés's work in ceramics, printmaking, video, and installation explores the colonial and imperial economies that tie the transoceanic movement of people and political ideologies across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Her installations and photographs of mass-produced decorative objects chart the history of colonial trade in conversation with her sub-Saharan and East Asian ancestry, demonstrating that the ancestry of black and brown populations is inextricably linked to trade and globalization. Valdés works with a wide range of source material that reflects the impact of global networks of exchange on contemporary issues of transcultural identity, displacement and migration, and the climate crisis.

Christina Quarles is a queer, mixed contemporary American artist and writer, living and working in Los Angeles, whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness. She is considered at the forefront of a generation of millennial artists and her works shatter the societal manners of physical classification.

Deborah Anzinger is a Jamaican artist who creates painting, sculpture, video and sound to "interrogate and reconfigure aesthetic syntax that relate us to land and gendered and raced bodies". Anzinger works as an artist has been featured in several exhibitions, galleries and museums which include the National Gallery of Jamaica, Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Jamilah Sabur is a Jamaican-born contemporary artist working across different disciplines and issues such as performance, installation, video, geography, identity, and language. Sabur lives in Miami, Florida.

Quisqueya Henríquez was a Cuban-born Dominican multidisciplinary contemporary artist. She worked in the mediums of sculpture, photography, sound art, installation art, video art, and collage. Henríquez's work has been included in many international exhibitions and biennials.

References

  1. 1 2 McKee, C. C. (13 February 2022). "Deborah Jack Explores the Shared Histories of the Body and Landscape". Hyperallergic. Archived from the original on 1 May 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 McKee, C. C. (3 April 2019). "'a salting of sorts': Salt, Sea, and Affective Form in the Work of Deborah Jack" (PDF). Art Journal. 78 (2): 14–27. doi:10.1080/00043249.2019.1626155. S2CID   199201274. Archived (PDF) from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  3. ↑ De Windt, Daniella (30 June 2022). "In the Hot Seat with Deborah Jack". The Daily Herald. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 Dees, Sasha (5 July 2014). "Deborah Jack". Africanah. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  5. ↑ Lanay, Jessica (24 February 2021). "Mare Incognitum / Unknown Sea: Deborah Jack…". BOMB Magazine . Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
  6. 1 2 Young, Hershini Bhana (2006). "Salt, Slavery, and Other Hauntings: Deborah Jack's SHORE (2004)". Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body. UPNE. pp. 73–81. ISBN   978-1-58465-519-0. Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 9 March 2023.
  7. ↑ Uszerowicz, Monica (16 November 2021). "Deborah Jack's Poetic Work Draws Parallels between Hurricanes and Caribbean History". Artsy. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  8. ↑ "Deborah Jack: 'The Caribbean is at the forefront of precarity and climate change'". The Daily Herald. 4 June 2021. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  9. ↑ "Deborah Jack, Dorbrene O'Marde, Fabian Badejo, winners of the Presidents Award from St. Martin Book Fair 2021". SKNVibes. 7 June 2021. Archived from the original on 8 March 2023. Retrieved 8 March 2023.
  10. 1 2 "The Days That Build Us • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  11. ↑ "OPENING: Deborah Jack's, 'somewhere in the tangle of limbs and roots' November 19, 2010". Upcoming.com. 12 November 2010. Archived from the original on 28 March 2023. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  12. ↑ "PAMM presents The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art". Miami Art Scene™. 12 July 2019. Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
  13. ↑ "The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
  14. ↑ "Deborah Jack: 20 Years". Pen and Brush. 2021. Archived from the original on 20 May 2023. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  15. ↑ "MCA Chicago - Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today". MCA Chicago. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  16. ↑ Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today , retrieved 3 September 2024
  17. ↑ "Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today | MCASD | Exhibition". Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Retrieved 3 September 2024.
  18. ↑ Vazquez, Neil (25 July 2019). "'The Other Side of Now' at PAMM Presents the Best of Contemporary Caribbean Art". Miami New Times . Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
  19. ↑ "Collecting 101: acquisition of Deborah Jack's 'the water between us remembers, so we wear this history on our skin, long for a sea-bath and hope the salt will cure what ails us'". Smith College Museum of Art. 1 April 2021. Archived from the original on 25 April 2023. Retrieved 25 April 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.