Jacob’s Work in deCordova Exhibition Praised in Boston Globe

“Walking Sculpture 1967–2015” at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln through September 13, features Wendy Jacob’s  Explorers Club, 2008–11, a photo series based on her extended collaboration with Stefano Macauli, a 12-year-old with autism.  The exhibition “considers the history and practice of walking as a means for questioning social, political, economic, and artistic hierarchies.”  In his review of the exhibition in The Boston Globe, art critic Sebastian Smee wrote extensively and quite favorably about Explorers Club:

….One work by a local artist, Wendy Jacob, not only fits into the genealogy of walking-as-sculpture, but drew me in on its own terms. In the past Jacob has, rather arrestingly, used tightrope walks through windows and between buildings in Cambridge as a way to express the permeability of private and public space (as well as an admirable amount of derring-do). But in her work here, “Explorers Club,” she collaborated with Stefano Macauli, a 12-year-old with autism who, according to his mother, experiences difficulties ordering space.

Macauli, Jacob, and Jacob’s students at MIT formed the Explorers Club, which, for two years, traced paths through disparate parts of Boston, just as Theseus navigated his way through the labyrinth. They emerged at every MBTA station to explore the area on foot, with a view to expanding Macauli’s horizons and, in a sense, easing his way.

Jacob’s photographs taken on these walks show urban scenes crossed with fluorescent orange vinyl tape. Although the photographs show different scenes, they abut one another and are arranged so that the tape forms a continuous line from one scene to the next. I was struck by both the simplicity and sincerity of the idea, as well as its rich metaphorical possibilities.

How do we map and make sense of our lives, which can feel so fragmented and dissonant? We tell stories, play music, make pictures. And quite often we walk. If we do walk, it helps, Jacob reminds us, to have balls of string or tape — or at the very least crumbs.

Other artists included in the exhibition, which will be on view through September 13, are Francis Alÿs, Hannah Barco, Stanley Brouwn, André Cadere, Tyler Coburn, Kate Colby and Todd Shalom, Catherine D’Ignazio, Simon Faithfull, Shilpa Gupta, Sharon Hayes, Joachim Koester, Melanie Manchot, Helen Mirra, Bruce Nauman, Paulo Nazareth, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and William Pope.L.

Wendy’s Prospectus project with Theodossis Issaias can be accessed here: Personal Kingdom.