Paying Dues and other Floral Commitments is a deep meditation on the urgent need to honor our unliving loved ones and those still alive. Shane-Jahi Jackson’s (b.1987; Denver Colorado) florals is also a rebuttal to a world that often eclipses African American’s humanity, value and importance. For the artist, his flowers function as living altars.

A bouquet of flowers is ubiquitous to the idea of “an offering” or “a gift” even with its expected short lifespan. This exhibition, however, turns this notion of flowers as a temporary gift on its head by suggesting that the figures are the real gift and a love that is enduring through time. Shane-Jahi’s flowers represent a homage, celebration and a declaration of love for his children, family, and for Black life in the figurative paintings included in the exhibition. His flowers, in fact, act like regal ornaments and praise songs watching over his loved ones.

This exhibition, Our Reality Not Your Pathology, now sixty years later represents a rebuttal to the famous Moynihan Report which sought to distill the Black family as deeply broken, deviant, weighed-down by misery and deprivation. The ensemble of paintings by Shane-Jahi Jackson provides his personal assessment  using his own family and the friends he deems family to illustrate the strength, resilience and joy that exist within the Black family.