As part of In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA, the Museum is pleased to invite featured artist Jane Dickson for a conversation with James Glisson, SBMA Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art.

Jane Dickson (b. 1952, Chicago, Illinois) makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-seventies counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographic snapshots, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives in New York.