Jed Jackson

Jed Jackson is an Arkansas-born, Tennessee-based painter and arts educator. He was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1974 and studied at Rhodes College in Memphis before pursuing his BFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee (conferred 1977) and his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. (1980).

Jackson has taught painting, art history, art theory and criticism and humanities courses at the college level for more than 35 years. From 1983 to 1988, he served as associate professor and chair of the Humanities Department at Medaille College in Buffalo, N.Y. In Western New York, he has exhibited at the Castellani Art Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, among other venues. He also served on the boards of directors of Hallwalls and the Buffalo Arts Council in the mid-1980s.

Among the students he taught at Medaille were musicians Robbie Takac and George Tutuska, both members of the band the Goo Goo Dolls. The band acknowledged its debt to him by titling their second albumJed (1989) and featuring one of his paintings, “Arkansas Sunset,” on the cover. (Click here for a 2009 article on Jackson's relationship with the band members and with Castellani curator Michael Beam, the provenance of the painting "Arkansas Sunset," and Jackson's 2009 retrospective at the Castellani.)

After accepting numerous teaching positions around the nation for the next decade, Jackson became a professor of painting at the University of Memphis in 1999, where he served as chair of the art department until 2006, and remains on the faculty there as of this writing.

Jackson is the author of the book Art: A Comparative Study. He is married to fellow artist and educator Valia Oliver. For more information on his work, visit JedJackson.com.