page_title: John P. Jacob
section_title: Mailart & Photography
hierarchical_section_title: John P. Jacob / Mailart & Photography
caption_attribution_description: Poster for John P. Jacob's exhibition "I Am Trying to See" at the Liget Galeria, Budapest, Hungary, 1988.
context_page_description: John P. Jacob is an American writer and curator. He grew up in Italy and Venezuela, graduated from the Collegiate School in New York City, and studied at the University of Chicago before earning a BA in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic and an MA in Art History from Indiana University.
context_section_description: John Jacob began his career as an artist, working with reproductive media including photography, Xerography, rubber-stamps, mail-art, and artist's books. During the 1980s, he taught classes on color Xerox and the rubber stamp as a print-making medium, at Pratt Manhattan, with mail-artist Ed Plunkett, and founded the Riding Beggar Press ("If wishes were horses...") to promote his and other artists' work. His first sale, of a sheet of artists' stamps for $75, was from an exhibition curated by Buster Cleveland for the 13th Hour Gallery (NY, 1984). 
  Jacob's efforts during this period include the irregular mail-art magazine PostHype (1981–85), and the International Portfolio of Artists' Photography (1983–86), an assembling book project conceived to integrate mail-art, book-art, and photography. Increasingly interested in issues related to censorship, and working with artists in the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, the final issue of PostHype (4.1) documented a mail- and phone-art project entitled East/West: Mail Art & Censorship. In 1987, in a self-proclaimed withdrawal from mail-art, Jacob published The Coffee Table Book of Mail Art: The Intimate Letters of J.P. Jacob. With an advertisement declaring "Each copy contains a valuable original artwork by a famous mailartist!!" Jacob gave away original works to recipients of the publication until his collection was exhausted. Jacob continued to exhibit as a photographer through the 1980s, presenting his last one-person exhibition, entitled I'm Trying  to See, at the Liget Galeria, Budapest, in 1988. He occasionally exhibited under the pseudonym Janos Jaczkó after that.
caption: I'm Trying to See, 1988
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