Tomashi Jackson, a mid-career artist, does indeed lead the serious viewer on a rich and complicated journey across a universe of civil rights history, specifically of America’s Black citizens, in the multi-level Aidekman Art Center’s galleries on Tufts University’s Medford campus, through December 8.

She also speaks generally to the minority status that all of us humans understand in this world of different, often arguing tribes, richly enough that we all resonate, whatever our ethnic status, with this particular journey.

This reviewer’s only caveat is not to try to take in this hotly relevant topic in one whole swoop. Either take breaks, if you have that discipline, or go with friends who are independent enough to spread out, use their own pair of eyes and artistic sensibilities on separate episodes of Jackson’s and our journeys and report back on their path finding. There’s also the option of multiple visits.

Jackson combines scholarship with a painter’s dramatic sense of the here and now. She speaks a fluently abstract language along with a grammar of civil rights that flows effortlessly from videos to framed moments of pain and triumph.

She is so broadly into her craft-person’s persona that she can veer from the homely metaphor of paper shopping bags lining a canvas with their looping handles, to PVC Marine vinyl, to soil from an Ohio site of the Underground Railroad and finally to marble dust sourced from the same quarry from which the Lincoln Memorial was crafted.