Further explore the exhibition’s themes of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: "Day Glow (Backlash)" is part of a collection called The Great Society, in which Tomashi Jackson has created a distinct way of viewing imagery from the civil rights era through layered, multimedia works that play with color, form, and semi-visibility. She uses materials that deliberately fall outside the edges of the artworks’ main canvases. This piece from 2022 features vivid DayGlo-type fluorescent pink, blue, and orange colors to catch the viewer’s attention. But the images are hard to discern, especially from close up, because they are fuzzy in appearance and the artworks are so large. They are printed in halftone, which means the paint is applied in a series of lines rather than solidly covering the surface. Faces in a crowd take shape hazily, as each image is printed in only one bright color with a series of thick and thin diagonal lines that are close enough to hint at the shapes but not fully render them.

Just over 6 feet high and 6 feet wide, the handmade wood structure serving as a frame is 9 inches deep so that the artwork juts out from the wall. Rather than being encased within the frame, the canvas sits atop it, affixed by an irregularly spaced combination of circular metal grommets and large brass hooks that wrap around the edges. The canvas is stretched tight to or sometimes only near the edges, with linen, paper bags, and textiles layered onto it. Much of the main canvas is hot pink with splashes of blue around the side and bottom edges. The long halftone lines cut from upper left to lower right. In addition to these lines, Jackson has taken diluted hot-pink paint and brushed along the diagonals in places. The lower-right corner features deep royal-blue paint over the hot-pink lines. In sections it is thick; and others, just a light wash that allows the pink lines and the white canvas to show through.

On the left half of the painting, two uniform rectangles of transparent marine-upholstery vinyl hang from grommets at the top of the frame and reach below the bottom edge to cast shadows on the wall. Rusty-orange halftone images are printed on the strips with diagonals going the opposite direction, upper right to lower left, creating the illusion of a mesh-like texture. Where the orange is thick, it appears like clouds semi-obscuring the painting beneath it. And where the paint is thinner, the viewer can observe multiple stories being told in paint at once.

A remarkable feature of this artwork is that the painted surfaces are embedded with Yule Mountain Quarry marble dust, which is where the Lincoln Memorial’s marble comes from. Although the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 was racially segregated, the structure was created to commemorate the former President Abraham Lincoln for the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the end of legal slavery. In 1963, one hundred years after this proclamation’s signing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. While this marble dust may not be visible, the historical significance of using marble from this place cannot be understated. Just as the images are layered physically in the artwork, meaning is layered into it with this marble dust.

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