Sarah Jackson

Who is Sarah Jackson?

Sarah Jeanette Jackson, née Sherman was a Canadian artist, who first became known for her sculptures and drawings and then became one of the pioneers of 20th century digital art.

She was born in Detroit in 1924, the only daughter of Jewish emigrants from Poland. At Wayne State University in Detroit, she studied Humanities, receiving a BA and a MA degrees, her thesis being on color and texture in primitive and modern sculpture. She graduated in 1948 and left for Mexico City where she taught English at Mexico City College and began her life as an artist.

In 1949, she passed through England to visit Henry Moore and then continued to Paris where Henri Pierre Roché introduced her to Constantin Brâncuși and arranged for her to exhibit a suspended sculpture at the 1949 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. After her marriage with architect Anthony Jackson, the couple lived in London, where her first solo show took place at the Galerie Apollinaire in 1951. Over the next five years, she participated in various London group shows and in 1956 with her husband and the Italian painter Emilio Scanavino formed group four in the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. That year the couple moved to Canada, where she continued to work in plaster and, later, wax and have her sculptures cast into bronze and exhibited in various galleries. In 1961, she created a large bronze Dancer for Cloverdale Mall in Toronto, a copy of which was purchased by Joseph H. Hirshhorn, who also bought other sculptures and drawings, which are now in the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. Jackson had been occasionally drawing and painting during the early 1950s, but from the latter part of the decade ink wash drawings became a major part of her work until the late 1980s. Her last bronze sculptures, three mythological figures, are in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.