Published: March 12, 2009 10:16 am      

ART: Jed Jackson returns for exhibit

The story begins with Goo Goo Doll Robby Takac’s “Music is Art” concert fundraiser and roadshow Friday at Niagara University. The college is also the location of the Castellani Art Museum, whose curator, Michael Beam, was a student of the artist whose “Arkansas Sunset” painting appeared on the cover of the Goo’s first album (so was Takac — two different schools). Thus, while the campus rocks this weekend, the Castellani will present the opening of “JED: 30 Years of Painting by Jed Jackson.”

There is more to Jackson than merely serving as a Goo Goo’s muse. An accomplished and prolific painter, author of art history books and currently a professor at the University of Memphis, Jackson “has three other shows about to open, two in New York City and one in St. Louis,” according to Beam, in addition to the Castellani exhibition.

In the 1980s, he was a fixture in Western New York’s cultural constellation as a painter with exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, board member of Buffalo’s celebrated Hallwalls art space and instructor at Medaille College. It was at Medaille that he inspired Takac and former Goo Goo Doll George Tutuska in ways of looking at art.

Said Jackson, “Several of my best paintings were executed in Buffalo, in my studio on Lexington Avenue. Openings at Hallwalls, fish fries and Polish and German food and lake effect whiteouts. It’s great to be able to return to refresh those memories.”

The Castellani show begins with a Sunday afternoon reception — Jackson and Takac will be in attendance — and runs through Sept. 20. The celebrated “Arkansas Sunset” will be on display, as well as 24 other paintings, a number of them loaned by local collectors who obtained them during Jackson’s Buffalo days.

Jackson is originally from Arkansas, with stops for schooling and teaching across America. His expressive and colorful work has been shown in more than 100 galleries, in solo and group exhibitions, throughout America and Europe. There is a vibrant appreciation of popular culture in Jackson’s works, what he calls “a manner of image-sorting, a kind of improvisation.” The observer will note cues from literature, movies, fashion magazines, music and politics in his work.

Although politics informs many of Jackson’s works, the most blatant will not be at the Castellani.

“We took the overtly political pieces out,” Beam said. “The serious, mysterious pieces are what’s in the show.”

Mysterious indeed. The artwork embodies realism with a twist and a startling sense of color. “Arkansas Sunset,” for example, depicts a pickup-driving good ol’ boy, surrounded by a luminescent and dynamic through-the-windows panorama in hues that match the dashboard dials, a liquor bottle and a packet of chewing tobacco with him on the seat. It at once seems so familiar and so otherworldly.

This weekend’s confluence of art and music had its start in the 1980s. When curator and Philadelphia native Beam was offered the Castellani position in 2003, he phoned Jackson, his teacher at Southern Illinois University, for advice about life in Western New York. The topic of the Goo Goo Dolls kept coming up.

Back before the south Buffalo band was internationally known and respected, Takac considered Jackson a mentor at Medaille (hence, the album cover as an homage). This weekend’s events, then, are something of a reunion for all three men, as well as a homecoming of sorts for Jackson. It’s nice when students remember their teachers that way.