Baker Artist Portfolios

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 regional 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 around the country.
 
He was born in 1953 in far west Nebraska and grew up near Denver where his father worked for the railroad. Livingston began his career in his early twenties in Denver, Colorado 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, Ann Waldman, William Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado where he attended their workshops. In the Denver area he often exhibited his work in combination with a variety of writers.

In 1980 he moved to Houston, Texas where he became an active member of the alternative arts and culture scene. He exhibited in various galleries over the coming decades, and helped found DiverseWorks, a cutting-edge alternative arts organization. There he was the literary program director and oversaw a seminal bookstore DiverseBooks 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 years primary election.

In Houston Livingston taught in the Artist In the Schools program. He was involved with many art related political actions of the 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 major 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. Following that 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 auto-fiction that mines stories culled from the artists life.

He also maintains an ongoing practice in paintings, prints, drawings, sound work, and video.

Livingston continues to live and work in Baltimore, Maryland, where he is represented by Fleckenstein Gallery.