Mame Jackson

Art Historian, Wayne State University – Techtown

Panelist - 1:00 pm, Thursday, April 7th – Catalysts for the Cretive Economy:Universities, Colleges and the Post-industrial City

Marion (Mame) Jackson is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and History at Wayne State University and is currently affiliated with CommunityEngagement@Wayne in Wayne State’s Irvin D. Reid Honors College where she is developing a new community-based service-learning and volunteer program, ArtsCorpsDetroit.  Jackson is also founding Co-Director of the non-profit organization, Con/Vida – Popular Arts of the Americas, located in TechTown, and serves as Arts Advisor to TechTown.  She holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and was a member of the arts faculty at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and the University of Michigan before coming to Wayne State as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History in 1995.

Throughout her career, Mame has been interested the role of art as it reflects, creates, and sustains community; she has studied relationships between art and community through her work with Inuit artists in the Canadian Arctic and “street artists” in the Northeast of Brazil.  In this connection, Mame visited the Baffin Island and Hudson Bay areas of the Canadian Eastern Arctic 15 times between 1975 and 1995 (each visit ranging from several weeks to several months) and has visited Brazil nearly 20 times times in the past 20 years, teaching on the faculty of the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2000-01.  Jackson has collaborated in the organization of several internationally touring exhibitions and has written many articles and exhibition catalogues.  Her work has been supported by research and program grants from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ministry for Culture and Tourism of the State of Bahia (Brazil) and from Wayne State University, Carleton University and the University of Michigan.