ALEX JACKSON:
The Making of “The Homesteader” (The Biography of Oscar Micheaux)

Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present The Making of "The Homesteader" (The Biography of Oscar Micheaux), a one-work exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Alex Jackson. The exhibition will be on view from September 5 - October 18, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, September 5, from 5:30 - 8pm. This exhibition will open in tandem with a solo exhibition by Alex Jackson's father, Keith Jackson, in the main gallery titled Knight Riders. 

Momentarily stepping outside of my larger narrative project The Universe of E, I reflect on the historical premise of my father’s exhibition Knight Riders, an exhibition exploring the history of three African-American men active in the American west at the turn of the 19th-century: cowboys Nat Love and Bill Pickett, alongside lawman Bass Reeves. 

The Making of “The Homesteader” (The Biography of Oscar Micheaux) is a speculative painting envisioning the production set of a contemporary reimagining of The Homesteader, a lost film by early 20th-century black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Made independently in 1919, this first film by Micheaux was adapted from both a novel by the same name and his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of A Negro Pioneer, two auto-bigraphically informed novels of fiction about his experiences as a lone Black homesteader in the Dakotas. The painting explores the roles of artifice in the retelling of history and lived experience, and the particularly unbearable weight of performing liberation under American duress. The revelation of construction is an attempt at relief, however temporary, from the myth of resolution.