Avocado Seed Soup (Davis, et. al. v County School Board of Prince Edward County) (Brown, et. al. v Board of Education of Topeka) (Sweatt v Painter), 2016
- Medium
- Mixed media on gauze, canvas, rawhide, and wood
- Dimensions
- 111 × 168 × 32 3/4 in. (281.94 × 426.72 × 83.19 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2017.50
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Director's Council
Jackson’s large-scale work Avocado Seed Soup (Davis, et. al. v County School Board of Prince Edward County) (Brown, et. al. v Board of Education of Topeka) (Sweatt v Painter) combines elements of sculpture, painting, and embroidery with subtly printed images of segregated classrooms. The title refers to three pivotal legal cases from the 1950s that argued against segregation, and the images are drawn from the relevant legal documents. Hidden in the base of the work are avocado seeds, which for Jackson recall an economy of scrappy resourcefulness, based on tales of people making avocado seed soup in the South during the Civil War. Jackson’s painting exhibits a similar sense of economy: the metallic foil is from discarded food wrappers, and the painted drop cloth was used by the artist in her studio to make the work. Avocado Seed Soup underscores connections between artistic vocabularies of the purity of color and civil rights legislation upholding racial “purity,” between abstraction and figuration, and between past and present.