Books by Taylor Jasper

Kandis Williams A Surface

by Taylor Jasper

The first museum survey for artist, writer and publisher Kandis Williams, whose cross-disciplinary practice delineates issues surrounding race, nationalism and authority

American artist Kandis Williams works across collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, pedagogy and publishing. Her multidisciplinary practice leverages the experience of the body alongside personal and communal histories to explore and challenge notions of race, nationalism, authority and eroticism, among other subjects. Her meticulously compiled collages are densely layered, both in structure--through repetition of forms and figures--and in content, with an emphasis on politically loaded and libidinal images. Often inspired by history painting, these works are composed of images culled from magazines and archival texts, placed into an unsettling interplay. Williams considers these collages as a disintegration of photographic value into layered schematics. Similarly, Williams' performance practice explores coded social choreographies, emphasizing structural and systemic violence. In her performances, disembodied segments of text become collages, making up scripts for her performers. Through this process she proposes what she calls experimental pedagogy, a "consumption of academic texts that have a non-discursive output, an affective output that mythifies--weaving what kinds of knowledge are immediately relatable to an individual with the creation of a paradigm of thought."
A Surface is Williams' first museum survey, offering visitors an in-depth experience of her vision and practice. The exhibition features both important and lesser-known works from the past decade of her career.
Kandis Williams was born in 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. In 2016 she cofounded Cassandra Press, a publishing and educational platform that produces and distributes Black scholarship. She is currently a visiting faculty member at California Institute of the Arts.

Suzanne Jackson What Is Love

by Kellie Jones, Taylor Jasper, Paulina Pobocha

A richly illustrated account tracing the full arc of contemporary painter Suzanne Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision

First and foremost a painter, Suzanne Jackson has worked for six decades in a dizzying array of genres, including drawing, printmaking, poetry, dance, and theater design. Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love reveals Jackson’s achievements as a leading and influential artist who has been in dialogue with her contemporaries, from Betye Saar and Emory Douglas to Senga Nengudi and Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

This wide-ranging book illuminates Jackson’s work and its connections to nature, environmentalism, performance, feminism, and Black and Native traditions. It explores the way her innovative hanging acrylic works break the canvas; the role of dance and set design in Jackson’s practice; and her trailblazing Los Angeles art space Gallery 32, which she ran from 1968 to 1970, and which became a focus for a circle of fellow emerging artists. The book also features artist dialogues between Jackson and Nengudi, Saar, Fred Eversley, and Richard Mayhew, as well as a conversation between Jackson and SFMOMA painting conservator Jennifer Hickey.

Exhibition Schedule
SFMOMA, San Francisco
September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
May 14, 2026–August 23, 2026

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027