Gerald Jackson (b. 1936, Chicago) lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. In May 2025, Jackson will present his first exhibition in Europe, Keep Looking: Works from 1978–2025 (curated by Matthew Higgs) at Kienzle Art Foundation in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Gordon Robichaux (2025 and 2021), Parker Gallery and Marc Selwyn in Los Angeles (2022), and White Columns (2021) and Kenkeleba Gallery (2020) in New York.

Jackson’s history was outlined in an expansive—and essential—2012 interview with his friend, the artist Stanley Whitney, published as a part of BOMB Magazine’s ongoing Oral History Project, which is available on BOMB’s website.

After a stint in the army in the early 1960s, during which he further developed his skills as a marksman, Jackson relocated from his native Chicago to New York’s Lower East Side, where he encountered and became a part of a community of vanguard artists and jazz musicians centered around Slugs’ Saloon, a now-legendary jazz club on East 3rd Street active from the mid-1960s to 1972. Having pursued studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Jackson began to exhibit his own work starting in the mid-1960s. He was represented by Allan Stone Gallery in New York from 1968 to 1990, and has had numerous exhibitions including at Strike Gallery, Rush Arts Gallery (curated by Jack Tilton), gallery onetwentyeight, and Tribes Gallery, New York.

His work has been included in a number of key group exhibitions including: A Decade of Acquisitions of Works on Paper—Part II, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); Afro-American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1970); Black Artists: Two Generations, Newark Museum (1971); JUS’JASS: Correlations of Painting and Afro-American Classical Music, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (1983); The Black and White Show (curated by Lorraine O’Grady), Kenkeleba Gallery, New York (1983); Notation on Africanism, Archibald Arts, New York (1995); Something to Look Forward to (curated by Bill Hutson), Phillips Museum of Art, Lancaster, Pennsylvania (2004); and Short Distance to Now—Paintings from New York 1967–1975, Galerie Thomas Flor, Düsseldorf (2007), among others.

Recent reviews of Jackson’s exhibitions have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Frieze.

Jackson’s work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.