Jane Dickson: Are We There Yet?

Jane Dickson (b. 1952, Chicago, Illinois) makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-seventies counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographic snapshots, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives in New York.

In 1980, as a member of Collaborative Projects Inc., Dickson helped organize and displayed work in the hallmark exhibitions The Times Square Show and Real Estate Show. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York (2023); Karma, New York (2023); Alison Jacques, London (2023); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2022); James Fuentes Gallery, New York (2022, 2019), Stems Gallery, Belgium (2021, 2020), Howl! Happening Gallery, New York (2020); and Seoul Museum of Art (2019). She was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Dickson represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Bronx Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.