John P. Jacob

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John Jacob 20191020 js 0023f1BW.jpg
John Jacob

John P. Jacob (born 1957) is an American curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela, graduated from the Collegiate School (1975) in New York City, and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic (1981) and an MA in art history from Indiana University (1994).

Contents

Mailart and photography

PostHype v3 n1, 1984 Posthype-3-1.jpg
PostHype v3 n1, 1984
The Howling Mad Mail, 1985 Howling mad mail.jpg
The Howling Mad Mail, 1985
I'm Trying to See, 1988 JPJacob Ligetposter.jpg
I'm Trying to See, 1988

John Jacob began his career as an artist, working with reproductive media including photography, Xerography, rubber-stamps, mail-art, and artist's books. During the 1980s, he taught classes on color Xerox and the rubber stamp as a print-making medium, at Pratt Manhattan, with mail-artist Ed Plunkett, and founded the Riding Beggar Press ("If wishes were horses...") to promote his and other artists' work. [1] His first sale, of a sheet of artists' stamps for $75, was from an exhibition curated by Buster Cleveland for the 13th Hour Gallery [2] (NY, 1984).

Jacob's efforts during this period include the irregular mail-art magazine PostHype (1981–85), and the International Portfolio of Artists' Photography (1983–86), an assembling book project conceived to integrate mail-art, book-art, and photography. Increasingly interested in issues related to censorship, and working with artists in the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, [3] [4] [5] the final issue of PostHype (4.1) documented a mail- and phone-art project entitled East/West: Mail Art & Censorship. [6] In 1987, in a self-proclaimed withdrawal from mail-art, Jacob published The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: The Intimate Letters of J.P. Jacob. [7] With an advertisement declaring "Each copy contains a valuable original artwork by a famous mailartist!!" Jacob gave away original works to recipients of the publication until his collection was exhausted. Jacob continued to exhibit as a photographer through the 1980s, presenting his last one-person exhibition, entitled I'm Trying to See, at the Liget Galeria, Budapest, in 1988. [8] He occasionally exhibited under the pseudonym Janos Jaczkó after that. [9]

Eastern Europe and USSR

Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany, 1999. JP Jacob Recollecting a Culture.jpg
Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany, 1999.

Since the mid-1980s, Jacob has worked with artists in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, guest-curating exhibitions for institutions in the United States and Europe, including the Liget Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle (Saale), Germany. From 1986 to 1989, he was supported by grants from the Soros Foundations, Hungary and USSR. Émigré writer Jerzy Kosinski contributed an introductory statement to the exhibition Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography (1987), describing the work presented as "the penultimate art of spiritual confrontation". [10] Jacob's exhibition The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union (1990) was the first one-person exhibition of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov in the US, accompanied by a parallel exhibition of works by four young Soviet photographers inspired by him.

Recollecting a Culture: Photography and the Evolution of a Socialist Aesthetic in East Germany (1999), commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, presented the archive of the FotoKino Verlag, publisher of the GDR's professional photography periodical, Fotografie, with works dating from 1929 to 1989. [11] The American photographer and theorist Diane Neumaier, in her history of Soviet non-conformist photography, credited Jacob's work as foundational to that of later historians such as herself. [12] His essay "After Roskolnikov: Russian Photography Today," edited by Neumaier for the College Art Association's Art Journal, critically examined the impact of Western attention, including his own, on the art of post-Perestroika Russia. [13]

Career and research

Jacob has been an arts administrator since the 1990s. He became director of exhibitions for the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University in 1992, and was named executive director in 1993. Jacob's exhibitions for the PRC include There is No Eye, a retrospective of photographer/musician John Cohen (2002), [14] [15] and Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia’s Killing Fields (with Robert E. Seydel, 1997). [16] Other exhibitions Jacob curated for the PRC explored the intersections of photography with dance and music, [17] [18] [19] [20] including the first presentation of photographs by Lou Reed. [21] [22]

In 2003, Jacob was named founding director of the Inge Morath Foundation by Morath's husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and daughter, film-maker Rebecca Miller, and in 2014 facilitated the acquisition of the Morath archive by the Beinecke Library at Yale University and a collection of her master prints by the Yale University Art Gallery. From 2011 to 2015, he served as Program Director for the Magnum Foundation's Legacy Program, and as contributing editor for Esopus (magazine) re-created early Magnum distributions, in a series entitled "Analog Recovery," from the vast Magnum archive. He is presently McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among Jacob's exhibitions for SAAM, the Art Newspaper ranked Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs the first most visited photography exhibition and the ninth most visited art exhibition worldwide for 2019, with 1,677,000 attendees; and it ranked Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen the thirteenth most visited art exhibition, with 1,132,800 attendees. [23] [24]

Jacob is married to Noriko Fuku, professor and director of the Art Communication Research Center at the Kyoto University of Art and Design (semi-retired 2017). Jacob's curatorial projects with Fuku include Patti Smith & Friends: Drawings by Patti Smith, Polaroids by Oliver Ray, and Photographs by Michael Stipe (2002), for the Museum Eki, Kyoto, [25] and Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent (2007), for the PhotoEspaña photography festival, Madrid. [26] The exhibition traveled throughout Europe and to the National Museums of Japan in Tokyo and Osaka. [27]

Jacob's papers and the archive of the Riding Beggar Press are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Selected exhibitions

Selected publications

Awards

References

  1. ↑ PostHype in MoMA Dadabase. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1981. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
  2. ↑ Welch, Chuck. "Global Network Zines: The Public Face of Mail Art 1970–1985". Lomholt Mailart Archive. Retrieved 10 February 2015.
  3. ↑ Welch, Chuck (1986). Networking Currents. Boston: Sandbar Willow Press. pp. 41–42.
  4. ↑ Jacob, John (1986). The 2nd International Portfolio of Artists' Photography. New York: Riding Beggar Press.
  5. ↑ Jacob, John (1987). Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography. Cambridge: List Visual Arts Center at MIT.
  6. ↑ Jacob, John (1985). "East/West: Mail Art & Censorship". PostHype. 5 (1). ISSN   0743-6025.
  7. ↑ Jacob, John (1987). The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: The Intimate Letters of J.P. Jacob, 1981–1987. New York: Riding Beggar Press.
  8. ↑ Varnagy, Tibor. "Liget Galeria Exhibitions". Liget Galeria. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
  9. ↑ Jacob, John; Varnagy, Tibor. "Closing the Book: Samizdat in New York City". 111+1+1. Liget Galeria. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
  10. ↑ Grundberg, Andy (July 19, 1987). "PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; Two Against the Current, One With the Tide". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  11. ↑ Goldberg, Vicki (February 7, 1999). "ART / ARCHITECTURE; Gleams of Creativity Through a Political Wall". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  12. ↑ Neumaier, Diane (2004). Beyond Memory: Soviet Non-Conformist Photograph and Photo-Related Works of Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p.  7. ISBN   0-8135-3453-4.
  13. ↑ Jacob, John (1994). "After Raskolnikov: Russian Photography Today". Art Journal. 53 (2): 22–27. doi:10.2307/777478. JSTOR   i231710.
  14. ↑ Brown, Leslie. "John Cohen and Why there is No Eye". Photographic Resource Center. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
  15. ↑ "There is No Eye". Photographic Resource Center. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
  16. ↑ Roma, Thomas (October 31, 1997). "Looking Into the Face of Our Own Worst Fears Through Photographs". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  17. ↑ Ham, William. "Velvet on Kodachrome: LOU REED at the Photographic Resource Center" . Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  18. ↑ Cutler, Chris. "Photos by chris cutler from Extended Play: Between Rock and an Art Space" . Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  19. ↑ Landemaine, Oliver. "The Velvet Underground: Exhibitions" . Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  20. ↑ Gordon, Mike. "Phish Tour Archives" . Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  21. ↑ Reed, Lou. "Emotion in Action" . Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  22. ↑ Reed, Lou. Emotion in Action. ISBN   3-88243-923-8.
  23. ↑ "Here are the ten most visited photography exhibitions of 2019".
  24. ↑ "Art's Most Popular: Here are 2019's most visited shows and museums".
  25. ↑ Dipietro, Monty. "The high priestess of rock 'n' roll 'n' . . . art". Japan Times. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
  26. ↑ Ray, Man. "Exhibitions". Man Ray Trust. Retrieved 8 February 2015.
  27. ↑ Okazawa, Kotaro. "Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent". Time Out: Tokyo. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
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