Artist Talk: Bill Jacobson

This event is free for students with ID and Aperture Members at the $50 level and above.

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons The New School for Design, is pleased to present an artist talk and book signing with Bill Jacobson. Jacobson has been making photographs for over forty years, and though his methods have varied, his work is united by underlying, ongoing concerns with memory and perception. In the 1990s, Jacobson became well-known for his diffused, defocused images. Through reducing both figure and landscape to their essences, his work from the period evoked the AIDS crisis at its height, as well as the relationship between photography and the passage of time.

In his most recent work, Place (Series), Jacobson has shifted to sharply focused, minimal still lifes, each involving a rectangular shape that in some way interrupts the environment within the frame. Of the new series, Jacobson states, “[As] the result of inserting rectangles of various sizes and surfaces in both constructed and natural settings . . . the work questions what is ‘real’ and what is ‘abstract,’ while suggesting that the creation of place and space . . . comes from choice and desire.”

Bill Jacobson had his first solo exhibition in 1993 at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Since then, he has shown throughout the United States and Europe, and has work in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and many others. Jacobson received a 2012 grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and has been previously awarded Aaron Siskind Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He has been in residence at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Five monographs have been published of his work; the most recent, Place (Series) (2015), includes a poem by noted poet Maureen N. McLane.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Charina Endowment Fund, William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Inc., and the Board of Trustees and Members of Aperture Foundation.

Image: Bill Jacobson, Place (Series) #425, 2010