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It’s been a decade since Tomashi Jackson last visited Houston.

The artist, who has garnered considerable critical acclaim and an exhibition at New York City’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, lived in the Bayou City during a 2015 residency at Project Row Houses. But they’re still, technically speaking, a Houstonian. Born in Third Ward, Jackson was adopted by their maternal aunt Aver M. Burroughs (whom they consider their mother) and relocated to Los Angeles as an infant. Houston never left their mind, however. They always wondered what awaited them here if they ever returned.

“What was Houston like?” Jackson recalls thinking. “There’s just so much that I didn’t know as an adoptee…and there’s so much that the adults just couldn’t tell me [because] I was too young to understand.”

The bold multimedia artist is back again, and now the focal point of a beautiful, bittersweet homecoming at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Open through March 29, 2026, Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe, provides a vibrant, chronological survey of the past decade of their work; a collection of video, textiles, mixed media, paintings, photography, and sculpture merge to illuminate issues of under- or misreported stories of the Black community, mortality, loss, and how to process all the resulting emotional complexities.

Vibrating Boundaries (Law of the Land) (Self Portrait as Tatyana, Dajerria, and Sandra), for example, involves a frenetic video collage. Footage of the 2015 McKinney pool party, an incident where police swarmed and aggressively detained a group of Black teens swimming at a community pool, is layered over a clip of the traffic stop that led to the arrest and eventual death of Sandra Bland in Waller County, Texas. Jackson then overlays those images with shots of local artists Emily Peacock and Patrick Renner, posed in the same aggressive stance as the officers in the referenced violence. Alongside the two, Jackson mirrors the vulnerable positions of Bland and the McKinney teens as a gesture of empathy. The grim reenactments between victim and victimizer were all staged in the sweltering backyard of Project Row Houses—an icon of Third Ward, and the same neighborhood where Jackson’s biological mother grew up.

Jackson felt a profound connection to it all. The McKinney pool party and Sandra Bland’s arrest occurred around the same time the artist was scheduled to visit their Texas home for the first time as an adult. Feeling unsafe, they changed their itinerary, staying within the greater Houston area for the duration of their Project Row Houses residency instead of traveling across East Texas to study school segregation as originally planned. Still, they say that such work has helped them serve as a witness to victims’ pain and violation and to preserve it all through art. They ask the same of viewers by extension.

“That’s really been the story of my life,” Jackson says. “To be guided by this compulsion to see and to make and to share things that are seen.”

Similar principles are at play in 2018’s Interstate Love Song (Friends of Clayton County Transit) (Pitts Road Station Opposition), a mixed-media piece featuring a discarded awning loaded down with silkscreened photos, mylar strips, and magenta and vermilion inks. This work illustrates how racist legislation and city planning make public transportation less accessible in majority Black neighborhoods, specifically Clayton County, Georgia. Images of the Friends of Clayton County Transit’s 2014 campaign to expand the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) are displayed in vermilion, while photos of white protesters in 1981, demanding a reversal of plans to open a transit line along Pitts Road in nearby Cobb County, are shown in magenta.

“The narratives that I sought to explore were narratives of self-possession, joy, self-determination,” they say. “How have people in a hostile environment congregated to self-determine, to create joy, to create safety?”

Jackson’s most recent works, created during the COVID-19 pandemic and while traveling through Colorado, continue the themes of uplifting neglected history and the intersections of community and personal grief. It also marks a further exploration into using performance and sound elements to convey complex emotions. Several works infuse musical elements, paying homage to a pillar of Jackson’s relationship with Burroughs: In the multimedia collage Minute By Minute (Juneteenth in Five Points Denver, CO 2023 / Leaves Study by my Mother in COVID Isolation in Bakersfield, CA 2020)—inspired by the Doobie Brothers’ titular album of the (almost) same name—Jackson delivers a sonic experience incorporating a recording of their mother narrating their family’s history of migration from White Rock, Texas, to Southern California. Alongside this oral history plays tracks from Minute by Minute—a favorite between mother and child.

Displaced by the skyrocketing cost of living, Burroughs moved from LA to Bakersfield, California. She subsequently died in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Minute By Minute includes the last 10 photos she snapped before her passing.  

“I’m thinking about how, if we stay alive long enough, we’re likely to outlive our parents. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon,” Jackson says. “If we live long enough, we also get opportunities to learn more about histories that have been…suppressed due to de jure and de facto policies of segregation.”

In a video series playing in the CAMH’s dark theater space, Jackson pays another tribute to their mother; this time, donning the smooth drag king persona of Tommy Tonight, a traveling musician from the fictional ’90s-style boy band D’TALENTZ. The suave sweet talker lip-syncs to songs dear to both the artist and their late mother. To Jackson, Tommy isn’t a rebellion against anti-drag and otherwise transphobic bill proposals—in fact, the character predates even the proposal of such legislation. Rather, he acts as a “container” for the agonies and ecstasies of their deep sense of loss.

Although the show often grapples with personal, generational, and communal trauma, Across the Universe stays grounded in love. For family, for community, and for the self. In triumph and grief. In oppression and solidarity. In history, geography, politics, and beyond. All of Jackson’s works yield new observations upon subsequent viewings. Every piece in the survey could come accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography, enriched as they are by Jackson’s impassioned boots-on-the-ground research.

“A lot of terrible, sad things continue to happen, but those of us who continue to live and seek good in one another, this is what we might be able to see,” they say. “We might be able to see things on a monumental scale that we never knew existed.”

Editor’s note: This article has been written to reflect artist Tomashi Jackson’s preferred pronouns (she/they).