Esteemed art historian (and father of our own Sam Rushing) W. Jackson Rushing dies
Introduction
Dr. William Jackson “Jack” Rushing III passed away on Sunday, October 26, 2025, at the age of 75, from complications related to Parkinson’s Disease. He was a distinguished professor and art historian of Native American art and American modernism at the University of Oklahoma for 12 years before retiring as emeritus in 2020.
Full obituary: https://www.havenbrookfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Dr-William-Jackson-Jack-Rushing-Iii
W. Jackson Rushing III was the Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin and served previously as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in Arts and Humanities at UT-Dallas. He worked in several intersecting areas: Native American art; modern and contemporary art; Southwest modernism; theory, criticism, and methodology; museum studies; and post-colonialism and visual culture. His teaching and scholarship explored the interstitial zone between (Native) American studies, anthropology, and art history. For more than twenty years he pursued a duality—Native-inspired modernist primitivism and indigenous modernism in the United States and Canada.
Full faculty profile: https://www.ou.edu/finearts/visual-arts/people/faculty-and-staff/jackson-rushing
For an example of his scholarship, see his 1995 book, Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism: https://archive.org/details/nativeamericanar0000rush/page/n5/mode/2up