Connecting Black Culture, Music, and Community with the Built Environment
One of eight artists in the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition, Cacie Rosario Jackson uses circuitry to study Black performance in the US from the 1930s to the 1970s.
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The panel designs, dark brown burned into light wood, look like circuit boards, radio dials, and musical scores, with tiny words tucked in throughout, like BLACK, LOOP, VOLUME, BEAT, and BREAK.
As a researcher, Cacie Rosario Jackson looks for circuits and connections, deep and wide, in many forms. She then translates and interprets the circuitry into works of art that connect Black culture, memory, music, and community with their environments.
Completing her second year in the Master of Fine Arts program at the Weitzman School, Jackson is set to graduate in May. She is one of eight MFA candidates who will have their work on view in Under Scores: 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition from May 1-31 in the Arthur Ross Gallery and the Gordon Gallery at Weitzman Hall. The opening celebration is April 30.
Jackson’s research centers around the Chitlin Circuit, a network of Black music venues in the US that operated primarily between the 1930s and 1970s. “Each site holds so many stories—I became interested in how these stories are collectively remembered and passed down over time,” Jackson said during an interview in her Weitzman Hall studio.
“I started thinking about the idea of a “circuit” literally and that took me to schematic diagrams,” she continued. “From there I started looking at graphic scores and music notation and became really interested in how the notations started looking like maps, and for me that connected music and place to generational storytelling.”
Jackson’s installation in the thesis exhibition will include a series of 10-inch-square works, and several larger-scale pieces, with companion audio of sounds from Black radio stations.
A ‘New Language’
Sharon Hayes, professor and chair of fine arts, said Jackson has embraced her MFA studies to strengthen and expand her commitment to investigating and exploring place-based histories, informed by her documentary photography and media production experience.
“Cacie is allowing herself to engage in a deep study of Black performance through the utilization of new methodologies, materials, and mediums,” Hayes said. “In this way, she creates pathways to understand how performance circulates beyond its original or historic site of occurrence. And she has developed new ways of mapping complex relationships between history and culture and technology.
David Hartt, associate professor of fine arts, also emphasized Jackson’s “deep, compelling interest” in communities and their relationship to the built environment.
“Her first-year final completely surprised me, and had such a degree of sophistication; the circuit board, the drawings, it was an absolutely new language we hadn’t seen before. It showed me that she was in an experimental mode, taking ideas and trying to find the right form for them,” Hartt said. “The language she is using is growing more and more sophisticated and confident, and with that comes a degree of not just resolution in the work, but an ability for the work to stand on its own.”
Under Scores: 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition is a collaboration between the Weitzman School of Design and the Arthur Ross Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Emily Zimmerman, director of exhibitions and curatorial affairs at the Arthur Ross Gallery.
“I started thinking about the idea of a ‘circuit’ literally and that took me to schematic diagrams,” says Jackson of this body of work. Image: Cacie Rosario Jackson, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin Tour, taskboard, ink, graphite, soldering iron heat, 2025.
Circuits
Jackson’s early research started with the Uptown Theater in North Philadelphia, where she learned many well-known musicians got their start. “That was my hook in,” she said. “The Circuit was a safe space for Black people to perform and enjoy music.”
She started with research online, including architectural plans and histories of the theaters. Jackson then traveled to Circuit locations and visited the theaters as well as local and community-run archives, museums, and university libraries. She went to Atlanta and Macon in Georgia, Clarksdale and Jackson in Mississippi, and Chicago, supported by the Fine Arts Department’s Halpern-Rogath Independent Travel Research Grant.
The most recent trip was to Nashville, funded by a 2026 grant awarded by Penn’s Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. She visited Vanderbilt, Fisk, and Tennessee State universities, and collaborated with Special Collections there. She also saw archives at the Jefferson Street Sound Museum and the National Museum of African American Music. “Visiting these sites in person is so important, even if the building is no longer there,” she said. “I was able to speak with neighbors, musicians, visual artists and hear their stories about their city.”
In addition, Hartt invited Jackson to be a research assistant for a 2025 exhibition and catalogue he was designing, Black Photojournalism, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The behind-the-scenes look at those archives “was really awesome,” Jackson said, adding that Hartt has been an important mentor and “challenged me to think about the work from so many different angles.”
Choosing Philadelphia
Jackson grew up in Connecticut, and came to Philadelphia in 2014 to attend Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.
While at Temple she saw the “Kitchen Table Series” by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, black-and-white photographs of different guests each framed in the same location in her kitchen. It was the first work that made Jackson “see why people make art and feel connection that it gives to the viewer, even if they can’t put that feeling into words,” she said.
After Temple, Jackson worked in photography and video production in Philadelphia. One job was with Penn, creating content for undergraduate Admissions on its “Previewing Penn” social media channels, collaborating with Kite and Key Society tour guides.
But it was while working for a design and development practice in Philadelphia’s historic Bok Building that she got a glimpse into adaptive reuse, urban design, and city planning. “I got excited about making artwork again,” she said. “I was so fascinated by old buildings and spaces having new life, and the layering of histories. You can't help but be in the old space and the new space at the same time. There's something unresolved about that I liked.”
That curiosity brought her back to Penn, attracted by the interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts program. “I was interested in city planning and historic preservation, and I knew I wanted that to become part of my artwork,” she said. “Each informs different aspects of the work, and I incorporate different methodologies based on what each piece needs.”
Throughout the semester students show their work-in-progress during critiques, when faculty, visiting artists and other students comment. Hartt recalls a “key moment” when he challenged an aspect of Jackson’s approach.
“I make suggestions to students all the time, but Cacie embraced these ideas, was deeply curious, and asked me for examples and instances and reference points,” he said. “She came back and had absorbed and processed these new ways of making.”
"Unlike electronics manuals, my schematic drawings are hand-drawn," says Jackson. (Photo Eric Sucar)
Art making
Jackson goes to the Terry Adkins Sculpture Studio at Weitzman Hall to use the soldering iron, burning her diagrams into wooden taskboard. “Unlike electronics manuals, my schematic drawings are hand-drawn, which makes the lines a little wavy, so it kind of feels like there’s some movement or maybe vibration to them,” she said.
The 10-inch-square boards feature depictions of various radio dials. “I was thinking about radio as another layer of a network of connection across space and time,” she said. “These are radio dials, but they also mimic an architectural plan or drawing.”
The larger-scale works depict the electronics of specific instruments, based on diagrams in manuals she found online.
“In the manual’s diagrams, the wires all have colors. I changed all the colors to black. And then I noticed that there were words, like SPEAKER, VOICE, AMPLIFIER, BUS,” she said. “You can see this abstract scene, but if you look at it long enough, you can begin to see a map. You can start to like imagine movement and place there.”
She names the artworks for the Black musicians who used them, along with the specific model, like “Jimmy Smith's Hammond B3 organ,” and “Jimi Hendrix's Marshall Super 100 Amp and Vox V846 Wah-Wah Pedal” and “DJ Kool Herc's Technics SL-1100 Turntables.”
“When the person interacted with this tech, they changed the course of music history,” she said.
Jackson plans to continue as a Philadelphia-based artist, settled with her husband in West Philly. “I’m really encouraged and excited to be able to continue an art practice,” she said. “I love the archives, community and institutional. I do really love looking at old things and seeing that we can still learn from them.”
