Solo Exhibition of Shane-Jahi Jackson

Oak Park Public Library Gallery

July 22 to August 23, 2025

Exhibition Title: Our Reality: Not Your Pathology

Guest Curator:  Juelle A. Daley

The controversial Moynihan Report of 1965 delivered a bleak and problematic assessment on the state of the African American family. It included some of the following brooding pronouncements: “the white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability. By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.” He went on to say, “the breakdown of the negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency and that “almost one-fourth of negro families are headed by females.”[1] 

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.  

Each of his paintings defiantly challenges Moynihan’s claim that, “the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress”.  Defying stereotypes, Shane-Jahi works celebrate the Black woman as the pillar and protector of the black family to include mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters and daughters alongside Black men and sons.

This exhibition lays bare the humanity and range of the Black experience and contends that “ it takes a village” not only the traditional family unit to raise a child”.

[1] The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research