Mary Jane Jacob

 “One of the things I love about Dewey’s thinking is the courage he gives us to seize our life and make it. This element of aliveness, the energetic vitality that comes with making, is grounded in experience, and is validated by Dewey.”

Mary Jane Jacob is Professor and Chair of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is the author of Dewey for Artists (2018) and the co-editor of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Rope (2022) for her show at Tate Modern in London, as well as Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society (2012), Learning Mind: Experience Into Art (2009), and Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004), among other books and exhibition catalogues. She was formerly chief curator at the Museums of Contemporary Art in both Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at SAIC. She has curated numerous exhibitions and artists’ site-specific and socially engaged projects.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

Dewey—whose understanding of human nature and the personal challenge each of us must seize to craft a life (which has everything to do with forging a democracy)—could not be more important right now. Democracy, which Dewey realized we must build iteratively with each generation, is lost on those who seek to be free from this invested task of making our democracy, who think freedom is found in what democracy does for them. Today, as I write, Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate. In this moment, to embody Deweyan democracy we must consider not just what American philosophy can mean but also how it can be put into action.

How did you become an American philosopher?

How? In a most circuitous route. From 1999-2004, I undertook with Jacquelynn Baas an experiential research program called “Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness.” I got into this project not because of any Eastern spiritual expertise, but because I’d curated some lived-practice art projects that, moving out of the museum, sought to test the possible relationships between artists, art, and audiences. One result was the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004). At the end Jacquelynn said, “maybe we should have looked at Dewey’s Art As Experience.” Then I did just that—for the next ten years—both through theory (reading Dewey in every which way, lecturing, and writing) and through practice (curating social practice with artists and audiences).

How would you describe your current research?

This past summer I have been surveying the books, conference workbooks, foundation reports, exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and theoretical treatises that I have amassed over the past 25 years. They now seem to chart the dynamic and contentious terrain of what we call social practice art. The keywords that emerge from this movement are community, education, and democracy.

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

One of the things I love about Dewey’s thinking is the courage he gives us to seize our life and make it. This element of aliveness, the energetic vitality that comes with making, is grounded in experience, and is validated by Dewey.

Five years ago, my husband (an historian and museum director, Russell Lewis) died after a brief bout with cancer. Everyone who experiences loss (and Dewey had his share), knows that in small or big ways you have to remake your life. For me, I must cook, every day, handle the material ingredients that are more than sustenance, compose and present them, even if just for me, and then share these makings with others as often as I can. At heart and in practice, I am a curator.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

The hardest question. I’ll say Peter Korn’s Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman. I’ll admit in part this is because this book is well designed; it feels good to hold. (When working on my Dewey book, I always tried to obtain early editions of his works; they were created in such a different way from now.) While Korn does not speak of Dewey, he follows a thread that starts with Dewey’s mechanic in Art As Experience, springs forward to Robert M. Pirsig’s brilliant Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: A Inquiry into Values, and on to David A. Granger’s insightful John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living. These books bring us back to what matters; they are centering. Making is a meditation.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-mary-jane-jacob/

Good question

The publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" on this day in 1962 put the world on alert to the dangers of overuse and misuse of chemical pesticides, proving a key motivator in the nationwide ban of DDT, a popular but hazardous insecticide.

Decades later, what is the impact of Carson's work?
https://to.pbs.org/3xTLPmW

Peace Corps

On this day in 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed legislation creating the Peace Corps, an agency aimed at fostering mutual understanding between Americans and people around the world.

Conceived as a Cold War initiative, the agency would outlast its original context, providing help to those in need globally and offering an opportunity to improve mutual understanding between Americans and those in other countries.

https://bit.ly/2HbaABJ

George

On this day in 1796, President George Washington's farewell address was printed in the Daily American Advertiser as an open letter to American citizens. The most famous of all his "speeches," it was never actually spoken; a week after its publication in this Philadelphia newspaper, it was reprinted in papers all over the country.

The address was a collaborative effort that took Washington months to finalize, incorporating the notes that James Madison had prepared four years prior when Washington intended to retire after his first term, as well as numerous edits from Alexander Hamilton and a critique from John Jay. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were accustomed to writing collectively; together they had published the Federalist Papers, 85 newspaper articles published throughout the 13 states to introduce and explain their proposal for a Constitution.

Now only eight years old, the Constitution was in danger, Washington feared, of falling prey to the whims of popular sentiment. In 6,086 words, his address seeks to encourage the nation to respect and maintain the Constitution, warning that a party system — not yet the governmental standard operating procedure — would reduce the nation to infighting. He urged Americans to relinquish their personal or geographical interests for the good of the national interest, warning that "designing men" would try to distract them from their larger common views by highlighting their smaller, local differences. "You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection," he wrote.

Washington also feared interference by foreign governments…

https://thewritersalmanac.substack.com/p/the-writers-almanac-from-thursday-433?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&r=35ogp

The Misfit Wisdom of Harry, Barry and Larry

"No literary genre has been so closely tied to a musical one as has Rough South to Americana."

Dwight Garner

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/21/books/review/harry-crews-barry-hannah-larry-brown.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Reality Check: How divided is America, really?

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/reality-check-how-divided-is-america-really/

Jane Addams

The first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Jane Addams was born on September 6, 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois.

https://to.pbs.org/4dRUM3c

Leaving Walden

On this day in 1847, Henry David Thoreau (books by this author) left Walden Pond and moved back to his father's house in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau had lived in the hut for two years, leading a simple life of gardening and contemplation, subsisting on a daily budget of 27-1/2 cents. When he moved back to Concord, he took with him the first draft of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, strung together from 10 years of journal entries. WA

"...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically...

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...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion...

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...I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..." 

LoA pics

 

Little Rock

When Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered state National Guard troops to surround Little Rock's Central High School on September 4, 1957, blocking nine Black students from enrolling, the reverberations were worldwide.

https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs/post/C_f0KXytpTL/?xmt=AQGz7RwOG9gk3K7yfiXHvyfniLNeBtLvXwnV5iu9e8Rt4g