Jack's profile
Jack Livingston is an artist, educator, and writer. His writing on arts and culture is regularly published in both online and print arts journals. He has taught at numerous colleges and universities, including the Maryland Institute, the University of Maryland at College Park, and Johns Hopkins University. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at Towson University. His work is part of The Menil Collection in Houston and appears in many individual collections across the country.
Livingston was born in 1953 in far west Nebraska and grew up near Denver, Colorado, where his father worked for the railroad. Livingston started his career in his early twenties in Denver as a visual artist, participating in the radical post-beat communal arts scene that promoted a DIY approach. In the late seventies, he was inspired by Beat Generation figures at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he took writing workshops. He frequently exhibited his work alongside various writers.
In 1980, he moved to Houston, Texas, where he became active in the alternative arts and culture scene. Over the following decades, he exhibited in various galleries and worked at DiverseWorks, an early influential alternative arts organization. As the literary program director, he oversaw DiverseBooks, a bookstore that hosted a vibrant regional and national reading series. During this time, he and writer Jan Werner founded Anti-Trust, an artists’ collective that critiqued propaganda. Anti-Trust received an NEA Grant for their pioneering work and their exhibit When the Parties Over, which followed that year's primary election.
In Houston, Livingston taught in the Artist In the Schools program. He was involved in many art-related political actions during that era, including ACT UP and the Women’s Action Collation. He served as the arts editor for an issue of Gulf Coast magazine and worked in the art department at The Houston Chronicle, the city’s major newspaper. Meanwhile, his painting grew larger and explored deeper abstraction, influenced by California artists who had been part of the Ferus Gallery Scene and Buddhist tantric painting. Menil Museum curator Walter Hopps was an ally and a significant source of inspiration.
Livingston moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1995, where he became deeply involved in the local alternative arts and culture scene. He started writing art criticism and launched print and digital magazines. For three years, he collaborated with high school students to design and build the three-story front mosaic wall of the American Visionary Art Museum. Afterwards, he participated in the city’s Community Mural Project.
Influenced by modern long-form cinema, fiction, memoir, and artists like Marcel Duchamp and Laurie Anderson, Livingston’s current project is a multimedia installation called Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska. The installation features painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, audio, text, and found objects. It is a work of autofiction that explores stories taken from the artist's own life.
He also maintains an ongoing practice in paintings, prints, drawings, sound work, and video.
Livingston continues to live and work in Baltimore, Maryland. He is represented by Fleckenstein Gallery.
