Lisa Jacobson
lisajjacobson@gmail.com
Thread: interrelatedness of all systems, both complex and simple.
AS AN ARTIST
I believe that art is itself a quantum system of thinking in terms of relationships, connectedness, and context. My paintings are living fossils: images of cross sections and invisible subsurfaces of matter, magnifying pre-biotic light not seen by the naked eye — they are views into what once was. Art is motion, moving with everything else in the universe. As such, art is an indivisible whole like quantum states and continua, rather than a discrete piece. The process of making things connects us, cellularly, to the continual flux of the universe. Composing and re-composing matter is at the heart of creativity in our holistic and ever evolving world. Art-making and art-viewing is a physiological drive, in that we all share in our need to communicate, adapt, and become whole with our ever-changing world.
CAREER NARRATIVE
I see myself as an art educator; both as a practicing artist and teacher of art, in the public sphere and in the classroom. My professional adventures have focused in holistic communities; collaborative projects whose primary focus is art as the touchstone that integrates the humanities, social and physical sciences. Art, to me, is an inextricable aspect of complex living systems.
Within the Small School Movement, working with science and humanities teachers, I taught art and developed curricula to support student thinking on an abstract level and to provide hands-on, project-based learning of how to self-integrate the underlying structure of art as it reflects in their work in writing and understanding how all things work in nature.
I have collaborated with several political organizations and unions: my work with Bread and Roses [1199SEIU] raised students’ awareness that making art is a form of work; my tenure at the School for the Physical City included designing and presenting models that integrated art and urban infrastructure, using the city as a laboratory. For Harvard’s Project Zero, Columbia’s Art Education Department, Maxine Greene’s Center for Social Imagination, and NYU’s Science Teaching and Learning Department, I developed integrative models that demonstrated the nexus of art, science and humanities. At Parsons, my teaching focused on drawing from the theories of physics. While with the NYC Parks Department, I guided students as they explored urban and natural environs and produced art reflective of their insights.
It is at the heart of creativity to compose and recompose the matter of the world. My work is a holistic process in which everything has a participatory role in the construction of an evolving world. My paintings are themselves systems and are not sustainable separate from the larger systems in which they exist. Within these communities art was peripheral to the core of learning concentrations.
But my goal was to show that making art arose out of a physiological drive in all humans to communicate and adapt; later I realized that the process of making things was the broader response to way to participate is to make things, to compose, on a day-to-day basis. An holistic world view, that is, the world becomes an integrated whole, not a disassociated collection of parts, as it has been treated in most American public school systems.
My current research is to develop an holistic world view through the process of painting, interrogating the painting itself as an object in the world.
I see my art in particular as an emergence of a pre-biotic past, that is, it may be an expression, a recycling of protomatter into new compositions. It may reveal the smallest to the largest scales and subsurfaces of matter. They are magnifications of p light once exposed billions of years ago becoming our cellular information in scales not seen by the naked eye; they are views into what once was.
For me, making art is in motion with everything else in the universe. My paintings are indivisible wholes, like particles, quantum states, and continua, dynamical processes with everything else in the universe moving perpetually. The process of making things is our way of participating in the continual flux of the universe.
I have immersed myself in purposeful communities with the goal of developing holistic, collaborative projects that locate art as part of the larger context of the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences. I view art as an integral feature of all complex systems that themselves are inextricably interrelated.
IN THE CLASSROOM:
I taught art at the high school level, at thematically oriented schools within the Small School Movement, If students learned how to think on abstract levels, they could connect themselves to their lived worlds, on micro- and macro-levels. My classes were project-based, developed in collaboration with science and humanities teams, in which students made art using underlying structures and origins of a subject as they reflected on their work in writing; the writing was then integrated into the content of their other classes. I collaborated with several political organizations and unions, such as Bread and Roses [1199SEIU], to raise students’ awareness that making art is a form of work.
I developed and taught an integrated arts curriculum at the School for the Physical City, a secondary school based on Outward Bound principles, that researched the urban infrastructure, using the city as a laboratory. I presented models that I designed of integrated art. humanities, and science curricula to such groups as Project Zero at Harvard, Columbia’s Art Education Department, Maxine Greene’s Center for Social Imagination. With NYU’s Science Teaching and Learning Department, I designed an art and science course in which high school students explored how we humans are inextricably connected to the universe.
As an artist-in-residence, I was employed by several arts organizations Agnes Gund’s Studio in a School, Arts Connection add others and the NYC Parks Department to bring arts-in-the-city programs to students; they explored urban and natural environments and produced art works grounded on the insights that emerged from these experiences.
At Parsons, I designed and taught based on theories from the laws of the new physics.
In all my work with students, energy feedback was necessary in our public exhibits, in galleries, public spaces, universities, of the work they produced. The above reflects only a portion of my teaching experiences; my resume fills in this picture.