Cacie Rosario Jackson

FNAR Thesis2026

Students

Cacie Rosario Jackson
Department
Fine Arts

Cacie Rosario Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the ways we collectively witness, remember, and pass our memories on. She investigates methodologies of music intervention (including improvisation, cut/scratch/remix, resonant bass, call & response) as practices of resistance, refusal, and recollection. Through photography, video, sound, and drawing, she engages 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 Chitlin Circuit offers a rich context to encounter layered histories of sound production, architectural design, social infrastructure, and oral histories that come together in each musical venue. Together, these histories constitute a collective cultural memory. Through her work, she interweaves these histories with the lineage of Black-originated sound, including spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz, rock & roll, funk, R&B, hip-hop, house, and techno genres - each moving/shape-shifting/carrying the stories of their generation forward to the next.

Black and white print showing the mechanics of a machine

Jackson looks at spaces of performance from different positions: as a researcher, crowd member, and cartographer. 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 combines various historic materials to imagine. The emphasis on circulation reinforces the ways these unseen modes of connection welcome ways of knowing that fall between what can be seen.

Jackson earned her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and an MFA at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

This work was included in Under Scores, the 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition.

Black and white print showing the mechanics of a machine
Piles of printed ephemera
Cacie Rosario Jackson
Installation view of two printed works
Cacie Rosario Jackson
Installation view of eight printed works