Suzanne Jackson & Bill Russell: There is Something Between Us

Suzanne Jackson’s painting There is Something Between Us brings together two legendary figures from two very different worlds. The arenas of professional sports and contemporary art have little in common on the face of things. However, Suzanne Jackson and Bill Russell were both living in Los Angeles in 1972—a city where black athletes and artists were crossing paths in a thriving cultural scene.

There is Something Between Us

This evocative painting by Suzanne Jackson is a significant work from her Los Angeles period of the early 1970s. This artwork was one of her lyrical paintings featured in her 1972 solo exhibition at Ankrum Gallery that launched her career. According to the sale receipt in the Ankrum Gallery papers in the Archives of American Art, William F. Russell bought this painting on the day of the exhibition opening, Monday, September 11, 1972.

Bill Russell

In 1969, upon his retirement from the Boston Celtics, Bill Russell had moved to Los Angeles. There he became a supporter and friend of visual artists Phoebe Beasley and Bernie Casey. As professional athletes, Russell and Casey had a natural affinity. Like the celebrated athlete-turned-artist Ernie Barnes, Casey had a successful career as an NFL player but had always wanted to be a painter. Casey was soon represented by the Ankrum Gallery in the 1970s where he had two solo exhibitions. Ankrum and Heritage Gallery were the only two white-owned galleries in Los Angeles that showed black artists at the time – located across from each other on La Cienega Blvd.

Suzanne Jackson

An active and influential figure in the 1970s Los Angeles artist community, Suzanne Jackson worked as a curator, educator and administrator. However, in 1968, she was struggling to break into the art establishment. Jackson opened her own space, Gallery 32, out of her studio in the Granada Buildings near MacArthur Park and the Otis Art Institute. There she exhibited her work and those of many other fellow young artists, including Emory Douglas, David Hammons, Yvonne Cole Meo, Betye Saar, Senga Nengudi and Timothy Washington. In Jackson’s recent NEA interview with Nathaniel Nesmith, she credited Bernie Casey for her career breakthrough. Jackson described how Casey, after seeing her paintings in Gallery 32, introduced her to the gallery owner Joan Ankrum in 1969. Art historian Kellie Jones also describes Bernie Casey’s important patronage of Jackson as indicative of the community of black artists in Los Angeles in her seminal South of Pico.

In Suzanne Jackson’s 1972 book What I Love: Paintings, Poetry and a Drawing by Suzanne Jackson, the artist paired illustrations of her paintings with her poems. There is Something Between Us accompanies the following poem:

“A/Fine/Big/Black/Man/Held/My/Hand/Turned/To/Me/
And/Said/Woman/You/What/I/Love”

While we don’t know of any relationship between Russell and Jackson, we do know they shared a friendship with Bernie Casey. There was something between all of them—a community with growing agency, part of an important cultural moment in the development of American Art. 50 years later, Suzanne Jackson is having another important moment. She currently has a solo exhibition Suzanne Jackson: Light and Paper at Ortuzar Projects, New York, September 12 – October 19, 2024. And in 2025, SFMOMA will open a retrospective of the artist that will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.