Tomashi Jackson’s “Here at the Western World,” with vinyl strips showing archival images layered over a canvas. (Photo: Tufts University Art Galleries)

Cambridge artist Tomashi Jackson dazzles in her first midcareer retrospective at Tufts University Art Galleries in “Across the Universe,” on view from Tuesday through Dec. 8.

The exhibition highlights Jackson’s ability to pack complex ideas into a variety of materials and media. She creates prints, paintings, videos, textiles and sculptures, infusing ideas of justice and equity into everything she touches, such as by incorporating archival images of moments in civil rights history into works.

Plenty of other artists take similar themes and create work that feels stale or overdone. Jackson’s work is powerful. She excels at bringing complex semi-abstract artworks to life inspired by American history and having them feel truly original, lively and captivating, and more than the sum of their various media.

A key piece in the exhibition, “Here at the Western World” (2023), pops with texture and color, a mix of neon pink and yellow. Likewise, in “I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop),” canvas and textile with PVC marine vinyl cover the wooden canvas in stunning purple and blue. A black-and-white image of a person is somewhat obfuscated by the materials’ pattern, vaguely ominous but memorable.

Tomashi Jackson’s “I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop).” (Photo: Tufts University Art Galleries)

As part of the Museums’ ongoing “Artist Selects” exhibition, Jackson has chosen an array of pieces from the Tufts Permanent Collection that complement the works in her own show. In one piece,  “Formulation: Articulation” (1972) by influential Bauhaus artist and educator Josef Albers, the color palette evokes “Here at the Western World.”

“The yellow and the violet pieces are really a nod to how to see ‘Here at the Western World,’” Jackson said. “With close looking, it allows for eyes to start to discern that there are no whites in that painting, that there are just various levels of violet, which is what Albers does here.”

“Across the Universe” is on view Tuesday through Dec. 8 at Tufts University Art Galleries, 40 Talbot Ave., near Powder House Square, Somerville.

Share your own 150-word appreciation for a piece of visual art or art happening with photo to [email protected] with the subject line “Behold.”