2009-10 LECTURE SERIES

Mary Jane Jacob
December 14, 2005 @ 6 pm

Précis
“Practicing in Public: Confessions of an ex-museum curator”

Mary Jane Jacob employs the genre of site-specific artists’ projects as a curatorial practice to address the social landscapes of the places in which we live today. In this lecture she will focus on projects that have evolved over a sustained practice in Charleston, South Carolina—a romantic landscape that has also served as a potent terrain for clarifying questions around public practice.

Biography
Mary Jane Jacob’s curatorial practice aims to advance the parameters of artists’ public practices and examine assumptions about the audience for contemporary art. Creating over 50 exhibitions and commissioning over 100 new artists’ projects, she shifted her workplace in 1990 from the museum (she was chief curator at MCA/Chicago, MoCA/Los Angeles) to the street, critically engaging the discourse around public space as artistic director for such public programs as “Places with a Past” (Charleston 1991), “Culture in Action,” (Chicago 1993), “Conversations at The Castle” (Atlanta 1996), and “Evoking History”—a program of deeply situated local projects which, since 2001, she annually produces for the Spoleto Festival USA.. With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2004), marking the culmination of a multi-year national consortium research effort which Jacob co-organized, she furthered her research into the ways of artmaking and the nature of the art experience. Mary Jane Jacob is Chair and Professor of Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.