Name John Jacob | Role Writer | |
Books Nightmare WorksTibor Hajas: An Exhibition | ||
John P. Jacob (born 1957) is an American writer and 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).
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Mailart & Photography
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. His first sale, of a sheet of artists' stamps for $75, was from an exhibition curated by Buster Cleveland for the 13th Hour Gallery (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, the final issue of PostHype (4.1) documented a mail- and phone-art project entitled East/West: Mail Art & Censorship. 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. With an advertisement declaring "Each copy contains a valuable original artwork by a famous mailartist!!" Jacob gave away original works of mail-art to recipients of the publication, until his collection was exhausted. Jacob continued exhibiting his photography through the 1980s, presenting his last one-person exhibition, entitled I'm Trying to See, at the Liget Galeria, Budapest, in 1988. He occasionally exhibited under the pseudonym Janos Jaczkó after that.
Eastern Europe & USSR
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 List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Germany. From 1986-89, 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.” In a review for the New York Times, photography critic Andy Grundberg observed with surprise its relatedness to “Conceptual, Fluxus, Earth, Performance and Correspondence art forms,” making it different more in circumstance than in kind from Western art. 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 the works of 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 1929–89, photography critic Vicki Goldberg observed of the exhibition that "In the socialist paradise that failed, art was supposed to join the battle to create a new classless utopia on its unstable antecedent, capitalism. Mr. Jacob has done a real service by reprinting some articles from Fotografie that give an idea of what was required of photographers." The American photographer and theorist Diane Neumaier, in her history of Soviet non-conformist photography, has credited Jacob's work as foundational to that of later historians such as herself. His essay "After Roskolnikov: Russian Photography Today," edited by Neumaier for the College Art Association's Art Journal, critically examines the impact of Western attention, including his own, on the art of post-Perestroika Russia.
Career & 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 '93. Jacob's exhibitions for the PRC include There is No Eye, a popular retrospective of photographer/musician John Cohen (2002), and Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia’s Killing Fields (with Robert E. Seydel, 1997). Of the latter, highly controversial exhibition, Thomas Roma wrote of its presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, "At best, the photographs from S-21 allow us to look into the face of our own worst fears and to contemplate our failure to protect others from living their worst fears. For me, as disturbing as it was to imagine someone deciding who will, or will not, be remembered, it was that very act that kept the larger human issues surrounding this body of work alive in my mind." The exhibition was also critically examined by anthropologist Lindsay French, in an essay entitled "Exhibiting Terror," on photography, exhibition, and human rights. Other exhibitions curated by Jacob explored the intersections of photography with dance and music, including the first presentation of photographs by Lou Reed.
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 2011-15, he served as Program Director for the Magnum Foundation's Legacy Program. He is presently McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Jacob is married to Noriko Fuku, Professor and Director of the Art Communication Research Center at the Kyoto University of Art and Design (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, and Man Ray: Unconcerned But Not Indifferent (2007), for the 10th anniversary of the PhotoEspaña photography festival, Madrid. The exhibition traveled throughout Europe, and was later re-conceived for Japanese audiences and presented in an expanded version at the National Museums of Japan in Tokyo and Osaka.