Biography

Lives and works in Oakland.
An accomplished artist and writer, Jacqueline Thurston creates evocative black and white photographs that probe the depths of the human psyche. Thurston’s lifelong interest in the psychology of the creative process and the nature of illusion has led to her numerous writings and lectures on the role of memories, dreams, and autobiographical stories as sources for works of art. While on one level her photographs aim to deconstruct the authenticity of traditional museum displays and to expose the ideological relationship between audience and subject, her lyrical images also suggest that she undertakes her projects with compassionate regard for the fragility of both human and animal life.

Thurston was born in 1939 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1961 before earning an M.A. in painting from Stanford University in 1962. She joined the faculty at San Jose State College (now University) in 1965 and the following year she co-authored the book Optical Illusions and the Visual Arts. Among her most noted photographic series is the Dioramas portfolio, which comprises 17 black-and-white photographs taken at major natural history museums throughout the United States.

Thurston remembers as a young child being initiated into the “world of illusion” after encountering her reflection in the glass façade of a diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She visited the museum regularly to take art lessons, and one afternoon wandered off alone and discovered that the dioramas she knew so well were not truthful reconstructions. “Standing on the edge of [a] particle-filled shaft of light,” she later wrote, “I was transported into timeless space, belonging more to the past than to the present. This space felt oddly like the spirit place occupied by the remarkably lifelike, yet lifeless, specimens contained within the glass walls of the display cases.”1

Thurston’s realization that she was gazing upon an exotic animal, forced to exist in a timeless place severed from history, elicited her unsettled response. Although Mountain Lion appears to be regally perched on a rock outcropping, Thurston imagines the circumstances of the animal’s death and reconstruction in her texts accompanying the portfolio:

And so a lion must be stalked, its great roar silenced, its skin deftly separated from its flesh, its flayed carcass carefully measured and cast at the site of the kill. Portrayal must be arresting, if it is to be experienced as authentic. … In a distant part of the world, the taxidermist’s skill and knowledge blend to create artificial lions, constructed of inert materials clothed in material skins, that radiate authenticity and a convincing sense of presence.2

What Thurston has vividly described is the method by which wild animals are killed and displayed as trophies in America’s natural history museums, and the way that their reconstructed “natural” environments help to mask the ideologically charged conditions of their capture and eventual display.

In her Mountain Lion photograph, Thurston manipulates both lighting and framing in order to belie the transparency of the museum exhibit. First, she is careful to allow two reflections to appear upon the surface of her image. This signals to viewers that the authenticity of the “realistic” representation should be questioned and examined as an artificial construct. Second, she carefully frames her image so that the mountain lion gazes directly at the camera, making the audience aware of the inherent power that their gaze implies. Aside from the polemics of display and representation, Thurston’s Dioramas also force us to grapple with our own beliefs about life, death, and immortality. “Like biblical figures called back to life from an untimely death,” Thurston writes, “the sacrificed pride achieves an allegorical as well as physical resurrection. The lions, the embodiment of bestial mobility, attain a form of immortality, as they live in glass containers, beyond their natural lifespan.”3 —A.W.

1. Jacqueline Thurston, Memories, text accompanying the Dioramas portfolio.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Jacqueline Thurston attended Carnegie-Mellon University, where she earned her B.F.A. in painting in 1961. A year later she graduated from Stanford University with an M.A. in painting. Following the publication of Optical Illusions and the Visual Arts, which she co-published, Thurston became interested in photography and has concentrated on making photographic prints ever since. A professor at San Jose State University since 1965, Thurston’s work has been exhibited on numerous occasions at venues including the Oakland Museum of California, Villa Montalvo, the de Saisset Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art. Her work is included in major public collections including the Library of Congress, Carnegie Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. The Dioramas portfolio is held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Ruttenberg Collection. SJMA’s portfolio will be unique, however, as it will include a variation of Neanderthal Burial Site, an artist’s print that echoes the imagery of the written reflection that accompanies it. These are the first works by Thurston to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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