Jonathan Jackson

Jonathan Jackson Jr. is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work bridges personal memory, political history, and speculative imagination. Born in California, he spent the first nineteen years of his life living under an assumed identity in the aftermath of the politically charged deaths of his father, Jonathan Jackson, and his uncle, George Jackson, a key figure in the Black Panther Party.

He is the author of the acclaimed foreword to the 1994 reissue of Soledad Brother, George Jackson’s seminal prison letters, which he was instrumental in bringing back into print. In 2023, he also narrated the audiobook edition. Under the pen name Ivan O. Martin, he published the early Afrofuturist novel The Reductionists (1999), a prescient exploration of identity and resistance.

As a visual artist, Jackson has worked primarily in painting over the last two decades. His evocative solo exhibitions—Yesterday’s News (2008), Flood of Memory (2018), and Residue of a Vision (2021)—have investigated the layered textures of personal and collective memory.

Jackson holds degrees in literature from the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University. He currently lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest, where he continues to crea...