Exhibition Debut
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery
January 28 – February 23, 2021
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is pleased to premiere Ariel René Jackson’s Descendance, a drone-shot video featuring interdisciplinary tap dance artist Michael J. Love and an original score by jazz musician Joseph C. Dyson Jr. Set inside an empty swimming pool at the George Washington Carver Center, Descendance explores ideas of lineage and generational change by transforming an American flag stenciled with soil. The exhibition, created as part of Jackson’s 2021 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency, also includes two-dimensional panels that use the same soil and flag stencil as the performance.
“The piece was influenced by dance and movement, by history that lives in the body,” Jackson says. Over the course of Descendance, Jackson and Love organically change the flag as they move through it. “I’m interested in the action of developing culture.”
The piece builds on Carver's Message in Blue, an earlier project in which Jackson and Love altered a soil-made American flag in the Carver Center pool to a recording of George Washington Carver reciting his favorite poem, "Equipment." Jackson frequently works in video, but this is their first video without language or text.
About the Artists
ARIEL RENÉ JACKSON
Jackson’s film-based multidisciplinary practice considers land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Through sculpture, video, and performance, they explore themes of loss and transformation. Exploring how culture is learned, Jackson modifies familial and antique farming, household, and educational tools and furniture, considering each object’s purpose before translation to a writing utensil, size expansion, or embedment within topsoil. Their recent work explores oral testaments and local histories, through repurposed meteorological tools and site-specific performances.
Born and raised in Louisiana, Jackson currently lives in Austin, Texas, where they completed their MFA at The University of Texas at Austin in 2019. Jackson is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019) and completed an exchange program at the Royal College of Art in 2018. Their work has been shown at various galleries and institutions such as the SculptureCenter; CUE Art Foundation; Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Depaul Art Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, and RISD Museum.
MICHAEL J. LOVE (DANCER)
Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist, a choreographer, scholar, and educator whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with a rigorous practice to engage in thinking on the Black cultural past and Black futurity. He earned an MFA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in Marketing Communication with an emphasis in entertainment marketing and public relations from Emerson College. Love's work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, and the Cohen New Works Festival. He has collaborated with Ariel René Jackson on a number of videos and performance pieces that have shown at CUE Art Foundation, the New Museum, SXSW, the University of Northern Colorado, PARA Foundation (Berlin), Vox Populi, and elsewhere. Love is an Austin Critics' Table Award winner and a B. Iden Payne Award nominee. He was a laboratory cast member of the Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe Broadway musical Shuffle Along.
About the George Washington Carver Museum
Located in Austin, Texas, the George Washington Carver Museum works to create a space where the global contributions of all Black people are celebrated through the preservation and exhibition of African American culture, history, and aesthetic expression. The museum is housed in a 36,000 square-foot facility that includes four galleries, a conference room, classroom, darkroom, dance studio, 134-seat theatre, and archival space. The galleries feature a core exhibit, The African American Presence in 19th Century Texas, a permanent exhibit on Austin African-American families, an Artists’ Gallery, and a children’s exhibit on African-American scientists and inventors.
