Mary Jane Jacob

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator and writer who pioneered public, site-specific, and socially engaged art in the US as a shared practice and public discourse through landmark exhibitions “Places with a Past” and “Places with a Future” in Charleston, South Carolina; “Culture in Action” in Chicago; and “Conversations at the Castle” in Atlanta. She also served as the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles, where she staged some of the first US exhibitions of some of leading avant-garde artists. Jacob has probed creative practioners’ relationship to audiences and society in the co-edited volumes "Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art," "Learning Mind: Experience into Art," "Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society," "The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists," and the "Chicago Social Practice History Series." Her most recent book is “Dewey for Artists" published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. Jacob is currently organizing a major exhibition of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz opening at the Tate Modern London opening June 2020. Mary Jane Jacob is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice.