Shane-Jahi Jackson (b. 1987, Denver, Colorado) is a self-taught visual artist whose vibrant, layered figurative and abstract paintings explore identity, memory, and the Black experience. Through richly textured compositions, his work examines personal and collective histories, often centering themes of African American lineage, representation, and cultural presence.

Jackson has exhibited widely throughout the Midwest, including at the University of Chicago's Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, where he presented Voices through the Orb (2023), and at Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he exhibited Generations and Opaque Mirrors of Beauty (2024). Additional exhibitions include Paying Dues and Other Floral Commitments at the Alliance Française de Chicago, Not Your Pathology at the Oak Park Public Library, and When Time Belongs to Us at the Joliet Public Library.

In 2025, Jackson presented solo exhibitions including Black Female Presence at Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago and a solo exhibition at the Anderson Arts Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has also participated in the Black Creativity Juried Exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and was recently accepted into the Rockford Art Museum's 78th Rockford Midwestern Biennial, a juried survey of contemporary art in the Midwest.

Jackson served as the Jan and Frank Cicero Artist-in-Residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he researched the archives of the Pullman Company to inform a developing body of work focused on African American Pullman porters and maids. This research reflects his ongoing commitment to exploring Black invisibility through painting and visual storytelling.

He lives and works in Morris, Illinois, and is represented by DSquared Fine Art & Culture Project Studio.

Bodies, for me, are containers of stories. My practice as a painter is to unveil those stories on canvas.

I am a self-taught artist who has honed my practice over many years, intentionally centering the Black experience through portraiture and abstraction. Painting becomes a tool to bear witness to our lives, our strength, and our fragility. I depict family, children, friends, and floral still lifes as acts of tribute and gestures of "paying dues" to those who shape and sustain us.

My process begins with drawing. As a child, I doodled endlessly, and that instinct remains foundational to my work. It is within this phase that I access a space of unbridled freedom to explore, improvise, and develop abstract forms before integrating the figure. This interplay between abstraction and figuration allows each composition to emerge as both intuitive and intentional.

A recurring element in my work is the Orb, which functions as both symbol and structure. These forms reference blood cells, evoking the circularity of life and the enduring connections among family, ancestry, and lineage. While I draw from traditions of classical portraiture, I disrupt them through decorative abstraction, layered mark-making, and mixed-media collage.

Ultimately, my practice communicates an ancestral story of vulnerability and resilience, inviting viewers to embrace the figures on the canvas and consider what is at stake when cultural histories are overlooked, forgotten, or erased.