Artists Suzanne Jackson and Ann Leda Shapiro discuss their works in the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body with Lanka Tattersall, MoMA’s Laurenz Foundation Curator of Drawings and Prints. Starting with a fresh look at the artists’ works, the conversation will expand to questions about transformation, the body, abstraction, and how an artist’s relationship to their work changes over time.
After the conversation, join us for A Vital Signs Artist Night, a celebratory evening including short artist activations, a reception, and an opportunity to see the exhibition. A Vital Signs Artist Night is cohosted by Angelito collective.
Suzanne Jackson lives and works between Savannah, Georgia, and St. Remy, New York. For nearly five decades, the artist has worked experimentally across mediums, including drawing, painting, poetry, dance, theater, and costume design. In her work from the 1960s and ’70s, figures and recurring symbols are built through multiple layers of acrylic wash on canvas, making for ethereal paintings in which any firm distinction between depicted elements is dissolved. Similarly built up through layers of pure acrylic, Jackson’s recent works are partially structured with produce bags, rods, paper fragments, peanut shells, bamboo bells, and leather string. Her “environmental abstractions” dispense with the canvas, allowing the paintings to move off the wall and exist within the space of the viewer. After Jackson studied painting and theater at San Francisco State University, she settled in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she worked as an artist and teacher and attended Charles White’s drawing class at the Otis Art Institute. There, Jackson engaged a community of artist peers and initiated Gallery 32, showcasing figures like David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Alonzo Davis, Dan Concholar, Senga Nengudi, George Evans, Gloria Bohanon, Betye Saar, and Emory Douglas. Jackson will have her first major retrospective from 2025 to 2026, organized by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center, and traveling to the MFA Boston. In 2023, the artist established the Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation (SFJF), an artist foundation dedicated to providing fully supported residencies for emerging and mid-career artists, particularly those underrepresented from the South. The foundation is based in her beloved Savannah home, where she has lived and worked for nearly three decades.
Ann Leda Shapiro grew up in New York City, next door to the Museum of Natural History and across the park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She drew daily inspiration from the cross-cultural collection of totem poles, masks, shamanic objects, stuffed birds, animals, trees, plants, skeletons, giant whales, and tiny shells. This environment served as a microcosm of the world, planting seeds that would guide her life’s work. Her other home was the Met, where she fell in love with art. During the 1960s she attended art school in San Francisco, where she created psychedelic backdrops for bands, protested the Vietnam War, and embraced feminism. As one of the few women serving as a university art instructor at the time, Shapiro lived a nomadic life, residing on a desert ranch in Arizona, in a miner’s cabin in the Colorado mountains, and aboard a ship that sailed around the world for the semester-at-sea program. In 1973, Shapiro presented a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where her paintings on paper explored themes of gender and mortality. She was shocked, however, when her more sexually explicit works were excluded from the show. Decades later, the Seattle Art Museum acquired two of these previously censored paintings for its permanent collection. While teaching at the University of Texas in Austin, Shapiro volunteered at an AIDS clinic and was introduced to Chinese medicine. The theory resonated deeply, reflecting themes in her paintings: the body as environment, patterns in nature, the balance of opposites, and the interconnectedness of all. Compelled to pursue this philosophy further, she enrolled in acupuncture school, initially as a research project. She illustrated and published a graphic comic book titled Art Notes of an Acupuncturist and eventually left academia after 14 years of teaching. Shapiro currently lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest, where she has practiced acupuncture for over 30 years while maintaining a rigorous art practice. Surrounded by forests, Shapiro finds inspiration in trees, focusing on their renewal and resilience. Her healing work informs her art, and her art informs her healing work.
Accessibility
This theater is equipped with an induction loop that transmits directly to hearing aids with T-coils.
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Access and community programs at MoMA are supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
Major funding is provided by the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.