Concentric Circles: An Interview with Mary Jane Jacob

(This story appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995.)

David Hammons, "America Street," installation for "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston," Spoleto Festival U.S.A., 1991. Photograph by John McWilliams.

One of the major players in the new discussion around public art is curator and author Mary Jane Jacob. As consulting program director for Sculpture Chicago, Jacob in 1992-93 conceived and directed the landmark exhibition "Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago," a two-year process of artists working in direct partnership with community members, which attempted to expand the role of audience from spectator to participant. Each artist created innovative artworks, programs and events around the city dealing with such urban issues as minority youth leadership and gang violence, HIV/AIDS caregiving, public housing, multicultural demographics and neighborhoods, achievements by women, labor and management relations, and ecology- issues of direct concern to the collaborating communities. These partnerships produced results as diverse as a storefront hydroponic garden, a new line of candy and an ecological field station.

"'Culture in Action' shook up Chicago," said Carol Becker, dean of faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It challenged conventional notions of public sculpture and brought art to the communities instead of making them come to it." Writer and educator Patricia C. Phillips cited the project for raising "significant questions and issues that have re-energized a dialog on public art."

The dialog continues with Jacob's work as advisor to Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Arts Festival, which is commissioning artists to work in partnership with individuals in the public sector. She is also curator of the 1996 Olympic Year project for the Arts Festival of Atlanta, fostering connections among the work of about 15 socially concerned international artists and world humanitarian organizations based in Atlanta whose work parallels the subjects of the artists.

Since the mid-1970s Mary Jane Jacob has been noted for her work in the national and international contemporary art scene, organizing exhibitions that championed artists outside the mainstream-those working outside New York, women, experimenters and nontraditionalists. As curator at The Detroit Institute of Arts and the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles she created numerous noted exhibitions, including "Kick Out the Jams: Detroit's Cass Corridor 1963-1977," "A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965," "A Forest of Signs: Art In the Crisis of Representation" and adventurous one-person shows for European and American artists.

Among Jacob's recent innovative public art projects was the 1991 Spoleto Festival U.S.A.'s 15th anniversary exhibition, "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston." For this show she commissioned 23 international artists to create new installation works in and about the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Michael Brenson in The New York Times called it "the most moving and original exhibition in the United States this season." A major book written by Jacob documenting this project was published by Rizzoli International.

We asked our Illinois/Midwest Editor Carole Tormollan to talk with Jacob about her experiments with art and community, what she sees as the role of public art, and how she would like to change the thinking at the level of museums and international exhibitions. -Ed.

Carole Tormollan: Given your recent support of community-based art, I'd like to begin by asking you if you woke up one morning as a "born again" or if there is actually a logical progression to your curatorial career?

Mary Jane Jacob: I guess I would kind of chart it as a group of concentric circles. When I was beginning my museum professional career at The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a major area of focus for me was the work of Detroit artists. Beyond the 13 one-person and group shows I organized, I also consciously thought about what message we were giving about the work through the form we gave to the exhibition, not just a concern with the work that's on the wall. For instance, putting the work directly in the 20th Century galleries and not in a Michigan artists' gallery was to say they are as good and as interesting as the other work on view by more widely recognized names. So that was one method.

Another was to do things on a large scale. The last show that I did when I left the museum to come to Chicago was a show called "Kick Out the Jams: Detroit's Cass Corridor," which looked at the work of artists from 1963 to 1977 in a larger cultural context. It dealt with the art in the milieu of the period and documented the music and poetry scenes as well.

Even prior to the DIA, while a graduate student, I served as curator of the Michigan Artrain. It was a great project, a program of the Michigan Council for the Arts in the form of a six-car train. It was programmed to be a quick mini-history of Western art with one car devoted to contemporary art and one to artists giving demonstrations. It traveled around the U.S., alternating tours in Michigan with ones out-of-state. As curator of the contemporary car, I organized a show for the Upper Midwest [Wisconsin, Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Iowa] from artists and collections in that area. As I traveled around and visited artist studios, they would tell me, if they were younger artists, that they were planning to move to New York, and, if they were older, that if they had only moved to New York, they would be famous now and their work would be recognized.

Now, I had grown up in New York and regularly visited museums almost every weekend as a high school student. In a way, I guess, unthinkingly I assumed there was a Museum of Modern Art in everybody's town. But then I was hit with the realization that not only was New York extraordinary in that way, but to everybody else it was the center of the art world. Rather than buying into that same kind of longing, and knowing how museums could be so formative on a child, I thought what an impoverished place we would have if all the art had to be in New York. So, it never interested me to work in New York. Instead it seemed much more important to create that kind of experience or other experiences outside.

Another thing that the Artrain taught me came from my first visit to the train when it was in Tupelo, Mississippi. I became aware of how audiences took the experience of viewing art, especially contemporary art. I heard volunteers say, "If you have any questions, I'm here." And people would make it out of that car as fast as they could walk from the front to the back. Now, I felt that, first of all, if they had asked any questions of this volunteer she might have panicked, because as I learned later she had absolutely no preparation. But the other thing was that the people had no questions; there was no context for a dialog. It wasn't that they hated this contemporary art, there was just no involvement, no engagement set up for them. So I picked out 15 things from the 60 on view, wrote a script of a couple of lines about each that were mandatory for the docent to say, and provided more information as background. Well, what it did was to cause an enormous traffic jam within the train, which was funneling thousands of people through a day. Because now people were hanging out in the contemporary car and they were there too long.

There was another audience lesson that occurred with the work itself. When putting together the show, the administrators of the train kept saying, "You can't put in that stuff. It's too weird, the people are going to hate it, you can't go that far out." And what I found they were really seeking, stylistically, was a kind of third-generation Abstract Expressionism, familiar if not accepted Modernism. They had a linear sense of the audience experience-literally played out in the tunneling of the six cars: that people must come to an appreciation of contemporary art chronologically, and perhaps art now is always out of reach.

I don't subscribe to that at all and so I had things by such "unknown," "local" artists as Siah Armajani. He had made a drawing for a tower on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota that at a certain time of day would cast a shadow across the state of North Dakota. The staff was just livid that this thing was going to go on the train. A simple black-and-white drawing, a kooky idea, people were going to hate it. It was loved, people loved the humor, they loved the imagination. It was also about where they lived. It was not an issue of being too contemporary for the audience; it all came down to how you talk to people about art-and that you need to take the time to talk.

In 1980 you started working at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. How did your experiences in Detroit translate to this new setting?

That brings me back to this idea of concentric circles, by which I mean art at the margins, that has not been quite absorbed into the art-world mainstream. But I believe that these areas of art become successive rings, absorbed into the whole, that enlarge our understanding of what is art, and are not hot, new topics that replace/displace each other.

So, added to the issue of regionalism- Detroit, then Chicago artists-was the work of women artists. I also had become involved in the arts-and-crafts debate. Then there was the rise of international art, and Chicago, with important and active collectors, was a great place to be. At that time internationalism meant only adding a few Western European countries to the already existing New York scene. But the first European show I organized, begun in 1978 in Detroit and opening in Chicago in 1982, was a retrospective of Magdalena Abakanowicz. It was not chic to be showing the work of a Polish artist, a woman, and a weaver- that is, an artist who had been associated with fiber art even though her training and the art went far beyond American craft associations. I give credit to the trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art because, putting all those labels aside, the minute I threw up the slides on the screen, they went, "Oh, wow, this is avant-garde; we haven't seen anything like this before." I was showing them her work from the 1960s and yet it looked fresh and exciting.

On the other hand, as European art became a hot commodity and we were showing and traveling an exhibition of recent German painting, there was great distress internally about the fact that a concurrent show of Rebecca Horn was put in the first galleries that one saw upon entering the museum. I thought the juxtaposition of shows was important-to extend beyond male painting to the work of this then-unknown German woman sculptor and installation and performance artist. The scale of Rebecca's work, particularly her "Peacock Machine" demanded its location in the museum; of course, I wasn't displeased either that it was up front. But the collector-trustees all wanted to know, "Where are the Kiefer paintings?"

Another exhibition in Chicago that I feel was a formative experience was the retrospective of Jannis Kounellis. It took over all the galleries of the museum, but also was staged in four other buildings around the city. This move was initially motivated on my part by the fact that the museum's building was so small, but in suggesting an additional venue to the artist, he saw this as a conceptual opportunity to extend the idea of his work into the city. With the unoccupied, turn-of-the-century German men's club and the three industrial buildings he built, he played out a metaphorical story about the European immigrant 100 years ago as a way of treating his constant theme: the transference of culture from the Old World to the New.

How did the larger community outside the museum respond to these projects?

The meaning of the work came from the buildings themselves, but the exhibition remained exclusive to museum-goers and not a public experience, even though it was outside of the museum, because of its institutional frame.

Do you think that you could have stayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago doing this type of show and pushing the envelope further and further?

Well I think the envelope continues. I mean, there's always the envelope to push, but an interesting opportunity came about to work in a bigger space and that was the great attraction of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Also at that time, with the inaugural show just opened and no exhibitions scheduled after that, I was able to plan some 40 exhibitions and performance works within the first three months that established the program and aimed to set up a philosophical framework for the next three years. On the one hand, I tried to do a quick catch-up on European art since L.A. had been virtually closed to those developments of the early '80s and no shows of European artists had taken place at MOCA. But some powerful trustees said, "Why should we be looking at European artists? What about artists from L.A.?" Showing the work of artists in the city where I worked-be it, Detroit, Chicago or now L.A.-remained of interest; it formed one of the concentric circles upon which I built my view of contemporary art. I did not see it as an either/or situation.

Upon my arrival in L.A., in fact, I put in the schedule a then-unknown artist, a resident at that time of Santa Barbara, Ann Hamilton. But that show didn't count because she was not from L.A. and she was not an artist whose work had been collected. The discourse was very provincial and market-related. We did an enormous, three-room installation, a real major effort and one of Ann's finest works. As always, I didn't feel that fame, age or price tag of works should determine the space allotted to the artist.

I also tried to institute a Center for Asian Studies. I remember people saying in the late '80s, "Well there is a great history of traditional and ancient art in Japan, but there's no real contemporary art." And, of course, past Japan, there was no consciousness of Asia at all. This is now finally being taken up by the Asia Society in New York under the directorship of Vishaka Desai. The whole Pacific Rim marketing lingo was taking hold at that time. So I thought, how do we find meaning in this and also create something of distinction for this new museum to be known by; how do we redefine the center by shifting the axis toward the Pacific rather than the Atlantic? While I began a research effort into this field, there was not directorial support for this initiative.

Also at that time, because of funding guidelines, there was an acceleration of multicultural concerns. I thought L.A. and MOCA were ideal sites for a real exploration of these issues, just as Chicago had been a fortuitous location to delve into European art. I thought, how do we deal with multicultural issues in a serious way, use it to build links to new audiences, and not as a funding hoop to jump through? But in trying to deal with this at the museum, I felt painfully compromised.

For instance, I began in 1988 to travel between Tijuana and San Diego to learn about artists working along the border. But I was told that MOCA's diversity obligations to funders would be addressed through the education and performance programs; we were not going to do shows of these artists.

Did you ever say to yourself, here's an institution that is both resistant to the multicultural agenda and is simultaneously practicing a pattern of tokenism in which previously disenfranchised voices become grist for an art mill that simply appropriates their voices into a linear kind of progression?

Yes. It seemed at times that multiculturalism just became the latest "ism," a style that the art world and museum would pass through on the way to the next, rather than a lasting part of our sense of contemporary art, another concentric circle that expands our notion of what art is, who makes it, where it's found. For instance, at MOCA diversity in exhibitions was always scrutinized statistically; these were not to be permanent voices, but rather a way of putting out a fire. Like, "Oh, Martin Puryear will fulfill our African-American slot." There was no chance to internalize what it meant to show the work of other constituencies, why and how it could shape and enrich the institution. This circle never opened up there. Instead, there was constant pressure to show Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis.

I found that with a significant increase of exhibition budget, there was less freedom. In fact, the budget for shows in Chicago was in some ways greater than in L.A. because it represented 50-60% of the museum's annual budget. This spoke of an institutional priority at that time. At MOCA, exhibitions were only 12-15% and yet there was still over seven million to raise annually and that meant the museum was very obligated to the Hollywood executives and others who built the museum.

I was commuting during those three years between L.A. and Chicago, where my husband was, and still is, Director of Research and Curatorial Affairs at the Chicago Historical Society. As I became disillusioned, his museum was very much at the forefront of the new multicultural agenda, reshaping its programs and operations to share authority with the public for the city's history, to bring in other voices. Plus I liked Chicago a lot. Also, six months before I left MOCA I received the first call from the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. about their interest in staging a significant visual arts event in 1991. So I left the museum in late 1989 to pursue a curatorial inquiry, which I felt was impossible to undertake within the institution at that time.

As you were leaving Los Angeles and heading toward Spoleto, what questions were you asking and what possibilities were you imagining?

The questions were about who was the artist-expanding the national and cultural parameters; where art could happen-looking beyond the institutional frame; who was the audience for contemporary art-testing whether the public could be more than arts professionals and a small circle of collectors and museum-goers. I was fortunate that I was able to investigate the questions I felt most pressing for the time in an open, wide-ranging dialog.

Out of my role as a founding member of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, I was asked to organize a conference that took place only eight months after leaving L.A. I brought together 50 curators from 33 countries for roundtable discussions. I did not want to set up a panel or lecture format since I thought that bespoke a hierarchical and less participatory mode that might lead to losing voices from less powerful countries.

We confronted the Euro-centric position on internationalism and talked about how an expanded world view could change international biennials as we have known them for the last 100 years. For that reason we used the occasion and place of the 1990 Venice Biennale for the meeting. Following this, I organized two other such meetings in Sao Paulo in 1991 and Barcelona in 1993 and included many of the same participants so that the conversation could go deeper into these topics.

And then curating "Places with a Past" for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston became a real way of dealing with these issues of artist, exhibition site and audience. There the fact that artists had an African-American heritage or were from foreign countries had an intrinsic relation to the work they created, just as the site gave meaning to each installation, and the audience was not limited to those of museum habit or experience, but was open to anyone on the street.

Would you say this exhibition was the beginning of your work with community-based public art?

No. In many ways Spoleto was still a museum-type exhibition, albeit in site-specific locations. Yet the artists, subjects and means tapped into the viewer's identity as Charlestonian or tourist. Through this we were able to establish profound entry points into the art for the community. Instead, I would say that "Culture in Action" [see HP #65, Spring 1994] partook fully of the genre of community-based public art. But where Spoleto, "Culture in Action" and my current work connect is on the idea of audience. "Culture in Action," I would say, was a grand experiment in the concept of audience that has a relation to museum practice as well as community-based practice. Those projects engaged their audience from the start and that audience was not the usual museum-goer audience. They were individuals who came to the projects out of interest or necessity, not because they had economic, academic or social standing. It resulted in an unexpected, I would say, "unfashionable audience," and for that reason, it proved to be radical-to the arts community! It was trying to show how art can be relevant to people's lives, but also can address multiple audiences in different ways. Yet the usual arts audience of the city dwindled. It wasn't who the artists were-they would normally have gone to see these artists if shown at the museum-or that the projects took place outside the museum. People were long familiar with seeing shows in odd and unusual places. Finally, I felt that it was the audience, because of the nonexclusivity this work engendered. But this program did prove to me that the audience for contemporary art is not restricted to those with art experience and that a linear progression of art history, a 19th Century concept upon which museums are based, is not the only route to contemporary art.

Would you describe the further evolution of these ideas and how they are informing your recent and current work?

"Culture in Action" was a means of coming to a greater understanding of audience and how art can relate to people's lives. It was also a way of presenting the current state of community-based art and beginning to set up a critical framework for it. But I am also interested in reconnecting some of these ideas to art as we have known it in museum exhibitions.

One current project well underway is for The Fabric Workshop/Museum in Philadelphia. It involves three years of commissioning about 20 artists to create installations. These projects are by artists who work conceptually and arrive at a material because of its suitability to the idea, far from the idea of craft into art. This institution is also an amazing resource whose operations are wholly collaborative, as the staff works through ideas and technical processes with the artist. The subjects of those in this program are strong and social: Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, Renee Green, James Luna, Pepón Osorio, Yukinori Yanagi are among the artists.

But also importantly, this is an opportunity to restructure the process of exhibition-making and touring to remain true to the artist's work and connect most effectively with the audience. So I am seeking to extend the collaborative model of artists and staff to partnerships between the Fabric Workshop/ Museum and museums participating in the tour. That is, each institution will work with us to select its own show of installations from the larger repertoire, responding to its own programming goals and exhibition history, while tailoring the grouping to its physical and financial limitations.

I have also engaged an educational advisory board of three leading museum educators whose work is rethinking the responsibility of the museum to its audience and community-at-large. By working together as a team we will try to not only frame the exhibition for the public in a way that can be adapted to the public at each venue, but also avoid the usual education vs. curatorial department split that occurs within the museum hierarchy. Working directly with artists and maintaining a focus on audience, we are able to rethink everything else in the middle to serve these ends.

I am also in the research phase of a potential international exhibition that will deal with the how, sentiment, purpose and necessity of "Culture in Action" projects and community-based work. It won't result in community-based work in the sort of way that we have defined that genre, but it is about taking some of the sense of what it's about and finding how that exists in art objects. I want to show that socially engaged art is nothing new and the need to deal with human problems through art has always been with us; why in the face of critical issues, art has always served a human need to grapple with, if not solve, these problems. Why in the face of practical necessities, have we always been compelled as a species to make art? And to me that is a way of coming back to validating the work of art in our culture which certainly is a much-contested issue in the U.S. today. I want to show how these impulses are present in community-based art and in museums, even if the museum experience as it exists today has neutralized this work. For that reason, this show will not be presented in the museum. At least at present, I feel that the museum as location is a limitation: Who goes to museums? What are the handicaps and historical inhibitions connected to the institution for so many members of the public? And once inside the museum, how are visitors somehow alienated or distanced from the art and the meaning which the artist wanted to convey or from which it emerged?

I was recently with trustees of a major museum who characterized the premise of their international show as one based upon the charge to the curator to go out into the world and find the best contemporary art. Well, putting aside an implied genre restriction and creeping cultural bias, I said to them, "Let's take that premise, which can nonetheless be debated, but which is a classic connoisseurship type of curatorial approach. Let's take that premise. Now how are you going to make that private selection a public experience?" I think that most museums of contemporary art are unequipped to answer that, even unquestioning. Yet, to me, contemporary art and artists offer us numerous routes to connect this art to people's lives. Instead, sometimes, I think institutions really want to keep that experience private and we've rationalized that that's okay, which seems to me to completely ignore the audience. I think we've created rather hermetic, chic circles, a kind of club, between the artist and collector and curator. The audience is totally beside the point. If the public doesn't get the work, they are stupid or ignorant. If they do get it, then the art is not challenging enough, too populist, and not of "quality." So maybe we have returned to why there is a schism of audience between the art world and the community when it comes to projects like "Culture in Action."

You've referred to community-based art as a stylistic term. Could you explain this further?

I fear that with the attention afforded community-based art of late, that it could become a stylistic term, like Pop Art or Abstract Expressionism. I think it's a broader sort of philosophical position. But if it is broken down into a formula and leads to an unquestioning way of working, community-based art can be more dangerous and reckless than a bad Abstract Expressionist painting made in the artist's studio, because it involves the lives of other people.

But I'm not sure we've arrived at criteria yet, either. There are community-based artists who I would say from my experience are not making good art, but are doing a great job of affecting other individuals in positive ways. I'm reminded of something I felt was a quite astute comment that Steven Durland made at a conference this past summer in Iowa. He was speaking about a performance that he had seen which he thought was not a very good performance and yet it had a profound effect on the audience. It was successful in that way that some other "important" art is not. So how do we reconcile that?

As current advisor to the 1996 Three Rivers Arts Festival public art program, one aimed to work in a way similar to "Culture in Action," I am trying to keep the relevant questions alive. The group of artists, which ranges from seasoned practitioners to a recent graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University's "Art in Context" program, are all questioning not only where their work is going, but the future of community-based art, keeping it from being co-opted by the art world, media or community itself. They are thinking about where are the short-falls? Why are they making art anyway if they want to be touching certain issues within society? What's the way to take this dialog to the next step, to help this method of working resist becoming a style? At the same time, conversations are happening with the community about how art can intersect with life. And it's exciting that these conversations are happening on community levels, without the artist and without myself, but sparked by the occasion of this program.

What do you anticipate these projects will ultimately look like?

They may not look like anything. We may decide in the process that what's more important is to set up a number of interactions. This is the whole other extreme from objectness. This is to say we're not ever making anything that we're putting the label art on. We're just creating a think tank, maybe it's a community think tank.

I want to go back and ask you some questions that have occurred to me as I listen to you say these things. You've talked about the idea of handing over the resources vs. commissioning people to do community-based projects and the "need to abandon the institution of art in order for it to be reborn in a new relation to the world." (see HP #68, Winter 1994, pg. 43)

As I struggle with this audience issue, I believe the kind of projects that I'm doing today would not be possible to undertake if I was working within a single institution. What drives the institutional agenda is who is in control and usually who's in control is who has the money. I am trying to work in an artist-centered way and to direct efforts toward the audience. To do so takes a degree of invention.

In retrospect, if you knew when you began your curatorial career where you would be today would you have prepared yourself differently?

No, I wouldn't have changed it, but I also wouldn't have predicted where I am now because I don't think I would have known that one can work as this free agent, in that sense. In terms of preparation, I'm really happy that I came to know art first through being in its presence, in an everyday, matter-of-fact manner, that is just by growing up in New York. Museums were part of what the city was about. Art was not something unusual, a rarefied experience, or reserved for the elite; museums seemed to me to be for the public. That was true of my public schools in that era, too, but not today. I would say that my greatest preparation for my work came from grammar school and high school, not from a university, and from being in the vicinity of New York museums. I'm quite indebted to museums. That kind of normalcy of the presence of art, its accessibility meant a lot. So when I came to it as a specialized field, I was most compelled by the direct experience of art as a viewer, as a member of the audience.

And then being a part of other geographical situations in the U.S. changed my perspective. Being in Detroit, for instance, was critical to my philosophy about the role of contemporary art. It was, to a degree still is, a dying society. Yet artists and the community were compelled to preserve art. It had, and has, a real function in that community, not just for the art world. So, I guess I'm not surprised where I ended up, but I'm glad I came to it from the outside in. I'm glad I came to it as a member of the audience first and then as an art historian with degrees and curator with credentials.

Carole Tormollan is the Illinois/Midwest Editor of High Performance.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999