An artist of originality and vision and an astute businessman as well, Earl Jackson has done much to define a contemporary visual style for African-American life. By the late 1990s, prints of his graceful, elegant artworks were widely and consistently sold in art stores and bookstores. A measure of their appeal to a wide cross section of Americans was that they appeared several times in hit films and television programs. “African Americans… are hungry for images on their walls— positive images of African Americans,” Jackson was quoted as saying in the International Review of African American Art. By responding to that hunger, Jackson became one of the few American artists unconnected with an educational institution to make a living from art full time.

Earl Jackson was born in 1948 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in nearby Willow Run, an unincorporated area west of Detroit that was largely dominated by auto manufacturing. He attended Willow Run High School (also the alma mater of the R&B vocalist and songwriter Nickolas Ashford, of the duo Ashford and Simpson), and graduated in 1966. Taking art courses at Washtenaw Community College and at Eastern Michigan University (both located in Ypsilanti near his Willow Run hometown), Jackson worked for some years toward an art degree. He never finished that degree, but along the way he obtained an education of a different kind.