Tomashi Jackson: A Shining Jewel in Connecticut

Art & Object

Frst Look: A Shining Jewel in Connecticut

By Katy Diamond Hamer

On the occasion of Robert Rauschenberg's centennial year, many museums and galleries organized exhibitions to honor him. This includes The Philip Johnson Glass House with The Catch One, a two-person exhibition featuring Robert Rauschenberg and artist Tomashi Jackson. Two Rauschenberg artworks from his Spreads series were acquired by architect Philip Johnson and his longterm partner David Whitney titled Ring Master and Recital, both were made in 1980. While one might not intuitively pair Jackson and Rauschenberg, curator Cole Akers recognized the material and conceptual overlap between the two. "When the Rauschenberg Foundation invited The Glass House to participate in its centennial initiative," he said, " proposed working with an artist to engage Rauschenberg's Spreads in the collection- and immediately thought of Tomashi lackson."

For The Catch One, Jackson created a series of new works to acknowledge the legacy of Jewels Catch One in Los Angeles, the oldest Black woman- owned lesbian disco in the country. A staple for just over 40 years, the club was founded in 1973 by proprietor Jewel Thais-Williams, who operated the iconic venue until it shuttered in 2015. More than just a nightclub, the space functioned as a safe haven for queer people of color. In 1989, Thais-Williams opened Rue's House inside the venue at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, providing services to women and children. The club was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2024 as part of the African American Historic Places, Los Angeles project.

Making reliquaries of sorts, Jackson deploys various materials choreographing them into layered compositions that collectively resurrect ghosts from the past in a quiet seance of sorts. The artworks honor a venue that held and embraced people who would otherwise have felt unsafe.

"With this body of work, I get to layer my own memories of my mother and her friends," said Tomashi, "sharing space together in our living room or at the Catch One nightclub where they could be themselves joyously." Histories of racialized segregation and sexual violence all resided outside the walls of the club, and for the women who ran it, containment was labor.

An Angeleno, Jackson identified a "historic throughline between The Glass House, Rauschenberg's compound, and the Black lesbians I grew up around," who were part of Jewel's Catch One. These sites share a commonality as sanctuaries made by queer communities for queer communities.

With titles such as Ms. Fat Booty I (Orange Strobe Light / Happy Black Lesbians Joyously Dancing at The Catch in the 90s) and Sister Outsider (Aver and April in the 90s and the Dance Floor in the 70s), both 2026, Jackson sourced archival photographs of clubbers transferring them into complex compositions not unlike the techniques used by Rauschenberg. She added, "Something special about Ms. Fat Booty I (Happy Black Lesbians Joyously Dancing at The Catch in the 90s) is that it's made with my own worn cotton leggings and a grid of earthen material pastes mixed from marble stone dust from Marble, Colorado, soil and palm tree ash from Los Angeles, California, and sand from beneath Rauschenberg's first house on Captiva that was known as 'Beach House.'" She was one of the last artists to participate in the Rauschenberg Residency, as the late artist's property was sold to a resort developer in March 2026.

Her work, specifically the two mentioned above along with Constant Craving Uewel Thais Williams and Friend at Jewel's The Catch One, 1970s / Spottswood Thomas Bolling, et al., Petitioners, v. C. Melvin Sharpe, President of the District of Columbia Board of Education, et al., 1954) from 2025, pays homage to aesthetic notations of Recital (Spread) installed nearby. Jackson shared that while on the island, "I got to work closely with studio manager Carrell Courtright in Bob's main studio space and learn how to complete two large image transfers for two of the four works in the exhibition." Where Rauschenberg once collapsed distinctions between painting and sculpture through his Combines, Jackson expands on that material agenda while conceptually raising questions of civic space, inequality, and visibility.

Set against the pristine architecture and manicured landscape of The Glass House campus, The Catch One is both formally rigorous and historically charged, merging two queer artists of di-erent generations who explore the destabilized characteristics of painting. Tomashi Jackson never felt overtly influenced by Rauschenberg, but making this new body of site-responsive artwork was significant. "Now I feel that we are very connected," she shared. "And I feel a-irmed by his oeuvre." Assemblage, in this sense, becomes a way of recording collective cultural memories through a highly personal lens.