veronica jackson
class of 2016
about
Veronica Jackson is Principal and Senior Exhibit Designer for The Jackson Design Group. As a creative exhibit designer, interpretive master planner, developer, curator, and interior architect for more than 20 years, she has honed her skills by working on culturally significant and historically prominent projects. Although most of her work involves cultural museums and heritage centers, art is substantial in this work because it is integral to the development of culture. Veronica believes that art is a vital means of self-expression and as such is a transformative experience. She is resolute in making sure it always exists and is accessible to everyone. As a result, she supports artists but particularly emerging artists to ensure they are able to engage in their craft. She gives herself many labels – cultural anthropologist, altruist, collector – but at the core of all three is this love of art; this powerful tool that is a way out of darkness for some, a means of self-empowerment for others. Whatever role art plays for the individual, Veronica has a passion to be involved in making sure that it is available to anyone who wants to produce it, gaze at it, debate it, or simply live with it.
veronica’s thesis
restructuring respectability, gender, and power: aida overton performs modernity
Less than fifty years after the end of slavery Aida Overton Walker, a premier vaudeville star, was on a mission to restructure and re-present how African Americans were viewed and perceived in American society. Through a feminist lens, this thesis accounts for Overton Walker’s embodiment of racial uplift and female agency. This visual culture study of images, writings, and theatre reviews—by and about Overton Walker—is grounded in archival research and a close examination of primary and secondary material.
Overton Walker has been an understudied figure in the era of the New Negro.
This project illuminates and considers her performances and their importance to popular culture in context of an emerging American modernity.