Oliver Lee Jackson has always been wary of politics. That is not to say that the artist, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1935, at a time when very few African-American working-class men made their way to art school, has not been involved in political movements virtually his entire career.
In the late 1960s he advised the St. Louis collective of musicians, poets, dancers and artists known as the Black Artists Group, while in 1971 he developed the curriculum for the Pan African department at the California State University in Sacramento, where he taught until 2002. Both bodies were born out of the struggles of racial segregation.
