Jane Jackson has been an Atlanta art world legend for decades. Founded in 1990, her namesake Buckhead photo gallery Jackson Fine Art, helped define the city’s reputation as a town with a particularly strong photo scene, which the High Museum of Art supported by growing its own impressive photography collection.
Jackson eventually passed the mantle at Jackson to protege Anna Walker Skillman in 2003, Jackson and went on to another high-profile job as the curator of the Sir Elton John Photography Collection until that role passed to Newell Harbin. Jackson left that curatorial berth after a decade, but kept a hand in the art world, assisting collectors with negotiating terms for sales at auction houses and serving for six years on the High Museum’s Executive Committee.
Now Jackson has embarked on a new professional direction still rooted in the art world. It’s a dramatic change of focus that may shock some for how it differs from her primary identification as a woman synonymous with Atlanta’s photography scene.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
But it’s not such a strange pivot if you consider how the art market has changed since Jackson opened her eponymous gallery. Like much of contemporary art, photography has risen astronomically in value, testified to by the accelerating auction prices of photography by Edward Steichen, Andreas Gursky and the record sale in 2022 of a Man Ray photograph “Le Violon d’Ingres” for $12.4 million. An outlier medium once relatively accessible for collectors has become enmeshed in an out-of-control art market.
When Jackson opened her gallery you could still pick up a photograph for $300-$500. “You can’t do that now,” said Jackson.
“I needed something new,” she said, speaking from the Object Space, which opened in January on the Westside and shares its location with Sandler Hudson Gallery. Jackson will mount three gallery exhibitions a year in the space, though her small office on site will always have work on display.
Jackson had been struck at the annual Design Miami Art Fair by the participating Paris gallery Thomas Fritsch Artrium, which was showing Pol Chambost’s 1950s-era ceramic pieces at their fair booth. “And they were so elegant and beautiful. And the price was not crazy. And, you know, you can pick it up,” she said, testifying to the tactile, sensual charms of this new favored medium of contemporary craft surrounding her at the Object Space.
“These people, when they make something, it’s not a commodity. It’s like a baby,” she said — a singular, precious and beloved object. She picks up a work by British artist Nicholas Lees — an elegant blue and white porcelain orb roughly the size of a bocce ball — sitting on a shelf in her cozy office packed with art.
“I love working with these artists,” she said. “They’re excited. They love the fact that their work is getting somewhere else. It’s fun.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Defined by the human touch, craft also offers far more access for anyone interested in building a collection. Almost every cheerfully colored vessel created by ceramicist Sophie Cook and displayed on a long table in the Object Space had already sold a day after the exhibition’s opening.
The contemporary craft market in that sense is a return to form for Jackson, whose gallery price point ranges from $300-$20,000. Her current exhibition, “Multivalent Women Makers: Renowned and Rising International Ceramic and Textile Artists,” is a sampling of what has captured her imagination in the realm of craft.
The exhibition features 15 artists from as close as Serenbe and as far afield as Sweden, like ceramic artist Eva Zethraeus.
Indebted to the natural world, Zethraeus’s virtuoso sculptural objects are covered with the trippy, tentacled protrusions of sea anemones or the sly folds of a cowrie shell. Rooted in traditional Japanese figures and talismans, Japanese artist Noe Kuremoto’s totemic, sentinel-like serene figures in an ashy matte brown and white are culture to Zethraeus’s nature.
The show includes tapestries with the kind of funky, abstract blobs and squiggles that might make fans of clothing store Anthropologie weak in the knees. Works range from Serenbe artist Rachel K. Garceau’s glossy porcelain accumulations of swallow-like swarms to Veera Kulju’s singularly wonky mirror-like frames with weathered, barnacle encrustations that suggest captivating portals to other worlds.
“I like seeing what I think might be coming,” said Jackson. “And I think this area is in a really boom, exciting moment.”
Art Review
“Multivalent Women Makers: Renowned and Rising International Ceramic and Textile Artists.”
Dec. 19-Jan. 13. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Free. The Object Space, 739 Trabert Ave. NW, Atlanta. theobjectspace.com.
Bottom line: A dramatic reinvention and focus on the rich realm of contemporary craft at Jane Jackson’s the Object Space.
About the Author
