Jack's profile
Jack Livingston is an artist, educator, and writer. His writing on arts and culture is regularly published in online and print arts journals. He has taught at many colleges and universities, including Maryland Institute, University of Maryland at College Park, and Johns Hopkins University. He is currently an adjunct professor at Towson University. His work is in The Menil Collection in Houston and many individual collections nationwide.
Livingston was born in 1953 in far west Nebraska and grew up near Denver, Colorado, where his father worked for the railroad. Livingston began his career in his early twenties in Denver, as a visual artist, where he was part of the radical post-beat communal arts scene that emphasized a DIY approach. In the late seventies, he was influenced by Beat Generation luminaries at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he attended writing workshops. He often exhibited his work with various writers.
In 1980, he moved to Houston, Texas, where he became active in the alternative arts and culture scene. Over the coming decades, he exhibited in various galleries and worked at DiverseWorks, an early seminal alternative arts organization. As the literary program director, he oversaw a DiverseBooks, a bookstore that hosted a vibrant regional/national reading series. During this period, he and writer Jan Werner created Anti-Trust, an artists’ collective that critiqued the nature of propaganda. Anti-Trust was awarded an NEA Grant for their pioneering work and their exhibition 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 increased in size and delved deeper into 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 significant inspiration.
Livingston moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1995, where he became immersed in the local alternative arts and culture movement. He began writing art criticism and founded print and electronic magazines. For three years, he worked with high school students to design and create the three-story front mosaic wall of the American Visionary Art Museum. Then, he worked with the city’s Community Mural Project.
Influenced by contemporary long-form cinema, fiction, and memoir and artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Laurie Anderson, Livingston’s current work is an ongoing multi-media installation titled Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska. The installation includes painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, video, audio, text, and found objects. It is a work of autofiction that mines stories culled from the artist's 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.
