Matthew Jesse Jackson

Biography

Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches courses grounded primarily in the contemplation of cultural experience since 1945. Jackson’s most recent monograph, Il’ia i Emiliia Kabakovy: Gde nashe mesto? [Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Where Is Our Place?] (Moscow: Breus Foundation, 2019), presents a comprehensive Russian-language survey of Russia’s most famous living artists. Jackson is also the editor and co-translator from the Russian of Ilya Kabakov: On Art (University of Chicago Press, 2018), the definitive collection of Kabakov’s writings in English, and the author of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (University of Chicago Press, 2010; new paperback edition, 2016), winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award from The Dedalus Foundation for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts, as well as the Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the prize citation reads, in part: “Matthew Jesse Jackson's The Experimental Group is an engaging, beautifully written, and erudite study of unofficial Soviet art. It provides brilliant readings of numerous individual drawings, albums, mixed media work, and installations…[T]his monumental study of creativity in and after the late Soviet period is a remarkable scholarly achievement.” The volume was also named runner-up for Book of the Year in art history and criticism at the American Publishers (PROSE) Awards and placed on the short list for Book of the Year by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL). Jackson earned a Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, thanks to Anne M. Wagner and T.J. Clark, and is also A.B.D. in Russian Literature, having been awarded M.Phil. and M.A. degrees from Columbia University, where he studied as a President’s Fellow. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude with a B.A. in French and German from the Florida State University.

Publications

“Slow Difficulty: An Exchange with Charles Harrison,” InterReview 9 (fall 2007); reprinted in Charles Harrison, Looking Back (London: Ridinghouse/RAM, 2011)

“Para-Performative Practices and Late Modernism: On Contemporary Art and the Museum,” Museum International, volume 59, number 3 (September 2007)

“Continuing Aesthetic Education,” in Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Center of Cosmic Energy, ed. Amy Ingrid Schlegel (Tufts University Art Museum/DAP: New York, 2007)

“Conversations with God,” in The State of Art Criticism, eds. James Elkins and Michael Newman (New York and London: Routledge, 2007)

“Martin Luther King Jr.: The Greatest Artist of the Twentieth Century?” BlackBook Magazine (October/November, 2006)

“Managing the Avant-Garde,” New Left Review (March/April 2005); appears in Spanish translation as “La gestión de la vanguardia,” New Left Review 32 (May/June 2005); in Turkish translation as “Avangardi Yönetmek” in New Left 2005: Turkiye Seckisi (London: Verso, 2006); a revised version appears in The Uncertain States of America Reader, eds. Brian Shollis and Noah Horowitz, (New York: Sternberg Press, 2006); and in Other Worlds: Selections from New Left Review 4, Susan Watkins, ed. (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2006)

“Rachel Harrison,” exhibition review, CAA Reviews (April 2005)

“Alternative Artists AT ‘Alternative’ Institutions,” in An Alternative History of Art, ed. Jill Snyder (Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art/DAP, 2005)

“Ilya Kabakov and the Concentrated Spectacle of Soviet Power,” ARTMargins: The Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern European Visual Culture (December 2001)

Review of Il’ia Kabakov, 60-e–70e...Zapiski o neofitsial’noi zhizni v Moskve (Weiner Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 47, Wien, 1999), Slavic and East European Journal (Winter 2001)