The Brooklyn Rail

For Keith Jackson, painting is an exercise in self-discovery and self-determination. Combing through his family’s history—documented in photographs and anecdotes and bolstered by his and his siblings’ memories of growing up in a rural farm town in Missouri—Jackson creates striking figurative paintings imbued with personal and collective significance. Though drawing inspiration from real life, he takes creative liberties with the details, incorporating images from different sources and elements that deviate from reality altogether, such as a vibrant chartreuse sky. Parsing Jackson’s work is not unlike the process of recalling a memory in which a visual archive whittled by time brings to the fore an image that seems believable but can never be the real thing.

For his first solo show in New York, The Provocateurs at Charles Moffett, Jackson uses his work to give life to a part of his family history that until recently he had never heard of: the 1937 displacement of 12,000 farmland tenants and workers in the Missouri Bootheel and the subsequent sharecropper protests of January 1939. Jackson discovered this little-known—yet consequential—story and his family’s connection to it by chance after receiving a book on the African American struggle for freedom, which contained a section on the 1939 sharecropper roadside demonstration. This event saw over 1,500 people protesting the New Deal in the same area where the artist’s family had lived for generations. Fascinated by this, Jackson began researching the demonstration and found archival media reports of the protest and the circumstances that surrounded it, including falling prices of crops due to government policies and the mechanization of cotton production.

Researching the sharecropper protest also led Jackson to discover the history of the 1937 displacement event: the federal government broke the Mississippi River levee to protect another town, flooding the area where Jackson’s family lived and giving residents only three days’ notice. The flood devastated the land and left thousands to face the winter weather without homes while claiming several hundred lives. As he researched this incident, Jackson realized the levee break was what his mother had been referring to when she said they had lost their farm in a flood.

In The Provocateurs, Jackson draws inspiration from this significant moment both in his paintings and in the examples of archival newspapers on view. Using photographs of his family and their stories as source materials, he also incorporates anonymous and historical figures found in his research. In The Architects (all works 2024), for example, he depicts two figures who are considered leaders of the sharecropper protest, Thad Snow and Owen Whitfield. Memorializing their role and the impact of their work as the titular “architects” of the event, Jackson shows them speaking in front of a farm along Highway 60, one of the roadways where the demonstrations took place. Whitfield has his hands slightly raised as if emphasizing the importance of his words. In the background is a barn with a line of parked cars and a stream of figures walking inside, suggesting a meeting is about to begin.

In Got Hustled, Jackson seems to have combined multiple scenes. Three figures stand toward the foreground of the work, each wearing several layers of clothes, a nod to the wintery conditions in which both the levee breaking and the demonstration took place. One figure is holding an eviction notice addressed to “Mr. James Jackson” that states he has thirty days to vacate his property. He is seated on a chest, likely containing his belongings. Dated February 1, 1939, just weeks after the demonstration and two years after the artist’s relatives would have received a similar note in advance of the levee breaking, the note possibly alludes to another displacement, or perhaps is an anachronistic reimagining of the actual events. This ambiguity and uncertainty of the precise reference adds gravity to the work: while the piece is tied to Jackson’s family history, acts of displacement, in particular of communities of color, are devastating occurrences common in the nation’s history.

Behind the seated man is another peculiar detail—a baseball player who appears to be mid-game, about to swing his readied bat. He is wearing a jersey for the Homestead Grays, a team from the so-called Negro leagues, the association of leagues of African American players who were excluded from the Major Leagues due to racial segregation. Standing on brown dirt that contrasts the rich red surface underneath the figures in the foreground, the baseball player resembles a collage element, as if transposed from a different scene. Jackson again leaves the exact details of this vignette ambiguous. While a sports historian might recognize the player, his identity is not specified in the work. However, the reference to the Grays is clear and ties into broader ramifications segregation continues to have. It wasn’t until May of this year that the MLB incorporated the Negro league into its player statistics, finally acknowledging accomplishmentall history, including Grays catcher Josh Gibson, who earned several accolades as long ignored. This correction made many former Negro league players record-holders in baseball and named Josh Gibson as the all-time leader in career batting average. Perhaps the work’s title and reference to “hustle” can explain the baseball player’s presence, referring to the athlete’s drive, as well as the plight of communities that are victims of injustice. Moreover, the player and the connection to the Negro league underscores the decades of repercussions that the disregard for Black contributions can have.

Indeed, throughout the show, Jackson references gaps in history and sheds light on the impact of what becomes part of official records. The archival newspapers on view underscore this fact. Some discuss the sharecroppers’ demonstration as an example of families taking a stand against governmental failure, but others use derogatory descriptions, calling them “a menace to public health” (Washington Times, January 14, 1939). While the viewer may not know the intimate details of each work, what is clear is they hold significant memories for the artist, as well as broader historical connotations. Blending references from different sources and displaying his work alongside old newspapers, Jackson inspires curiosity not only to know more about one’s own life, but also to understand the overlooked and erased moments in our shared history.