Connecting Black culture, music, and community with the built environment
One of eight artists in the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Weitzman School and Arthur Ross Gallery, Cacie Rosario Jackson uses circuitry to study Black performance in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1970s.
2 min. read
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.
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 says.
“I started thinking about the idea of a “circuit” literally and that took me to schematic diagrams,” she says. “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.
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