Jacqueline Thurston

Jacqueline Thurston (born 1939) is an American visual artist and writer, based in California. She is most known for evocative photographs that explore the human psyche, the nature of illusion, life and death, and primal forces of nature. Her work also extends to drawings, performance, prose and poetry. Her black and white photographic series of the 1970s and 1980s were identified as early examples of a movement toward "psychological documentary" Her work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and belongs to the collections of those museums as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Carnegie Museum of Art, among others. Thurston is based in Palo Alto, California and is professor emerita of art at San Jose State University.

Early life and career Jacqueline Beverly Thurston was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1939 and grew up in rural western Pennsylvania. She co-authored the book Optical Illusions and the Visual Arts with Robert Carraher in 1966, which led her to pursue photography as her primary medium in the late 1960s. de Saisset Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and appeared in later group shows at Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Orange County Museum of Art. She explored themes similar to those of the "Songs" and "Passages" series in two limited-edition artist books, Shadowland (2016) and Hymn to Hands (2017), which paired her Cibachrome photographs with her poetry and prose.

Thurston's late career has focused on photography and writing examining the mythology and iconography of ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, resulting in a photographic portfolio and book, both titled, Sacred Deities of Ancient Egypt.

Thurston's two trade books are: Optical Illusions and the Visual Arts (1966, with Robert Carraher), a creative guide that collected wide-ranging examples of visual illusions from painting, illustration, photography and graphic design; The latter book has inspired numerous lectures and an exhibition that Thurston co-curated with Egyptologist Lorelei H. Corcoran, "Writing in Three Dimensions: Myth and Metaphor in Ancient Egypt" (Art Museum of the University of Memphis, 2021), which featured photographs and antiquities from the museum's collection. Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Carnegie Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Library of Congress, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and San Jose Museum of Art, as well as several university museums. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1977) and was a Fulbright Scholar to Egypt in 2006.