Last week, my 50 undergraduate students and I visited the exhibition “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe” at the Tufts University Art Gallery. They looked carefully and derived many insights from the work of this important artist. I highly recommend the show, which is open until Dec. 8 and free.

I illustrate this post with a photograph of Jackson’ 2020 work entitled “Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line)(1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act).” The photo does little justice to the original object, which is monumental (more than seven feet high) and structural, a multi-media painting mounted on a tilted wooden frame. In the photo with this post, you can see the shadows that the object casts on the gallery wall.

The materials listed on the gallery’s label are: “Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric.” Jackson collected the marble dust near the Acropolis in Athens, birthplace of democracy. The whole work is overlaid with red-white-and-blue stripes that are slightly askew.

We discussed the composition: Black citizens waiting to register to vote in Atlanta in the 1940s (at the top); recent election flyers (at the bottom); and in the middle, LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act. The President is larger than anyone else. Does that mean that he played a pivotal role? Or that his importance is overplayed in conventional accounts of American history? Is he responsible for the law, or was that really an outcome of a process that began with the people at the top of the picture?