Cacie Rosario Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the ways we collectively witness, remember, and pass on. She investigates methodologies of music intervention (the blue note, improvisation, cut/scratch/remix, resonant bass, call & response) as practices of resistance, refusal, and recollection. Through photography, video, sound, and drawing, she engages the visual and sonic archives to think about how Black performance, cultural production, and radio express transgenerational storytelling. 

Jackson’s work utilizes found photographic and technological materials and recontextualizes them to create new dialogues. Her current body of work explores the Chitlin Circuit: a network of music venues across the United States (most active between 1930s-1970s) where Black musicians safely performed for primarily Black audiences. The Circuit is central ground to re-encounter collective memory, with venues acting as nuclei that draw layered histories – social infrastructure, built environment, crowds, oral histories, music production – unto themselves. Through her work, she interweaves these histories with the lineage of Black-originated sound: spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, rock & roll, funk, r&b, hip-hop, house, techno – all moving/shape-shifting/carrying the stories of their generation forward to the next. 

Jackson looks at spaces of performance from different positions: as a researcher, crowd member, collaborator with the near-past, sound-wave-translator. Her collage, video and sound work immerse the viewer in the collective movement of a crowd, where performer and audience create together without hierarchy. Her schematic drawings address the “circuit” more directly, with the heat of the soldering iron etching the passage of electricity, time, and radio waves across the surface. Her work creates a visual critical fabulation that uses historic material as a point of entry. The emphasis on circulation reinforces the ways these unseen modes of connection welcome ways of knowing that fall between what can be seen.  

Cacie is a 2nd-year graduate student pursuing her Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Pennsylvania.