After spending most of the last 15 years on the East Coast, Heidi Zuckerman-Jacobson found Berkeley’s unseasonably early spring somewhat unsettling. But that was a minor adjustment compared to the time-zone change.
“New York is arguably the center of the modern [art] world,” said Zuckerman-Jacobson, new curator of the Matrix program at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “I’m working with [and trying to call] a bunch of artists who live in Europe, and we’re kind of at [opposite] ends of the day.”
But it’s an adjustment Zuckerman-Jacobson is happy to make for what she calls her dream job.
“The Berkeley Art Museum has an incredibly strong history of presenting avant-garde art and film,” said the Palo Alto native, who became a bat mitzvah and was confirmed at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. “It has a progressive history that my philosophy can build on.”
For five years before taking her new post, Zuckerman-Jacobson was the assistant curator of 20th Century art at the Jewish Museum in New York City. In addition to conceptualizing and organizing exhibits, she commissioned artists to do pieces for the museum.
“All the artists were not Jewish,” Zuckerman-Jacobson said. Rather, she focused on what the artwork expressed — “issues relevant to Jews: Diaspora, assimilation, stereotypes, oppression, spirituality” — not on the religion of the artist.
Zuckerman-Jacobson’s final exhibit at the Jewish Museum was for Chanukah. She commissioned eight internationally recognized artists to create video and light sculptures.
“On each consecutive day, another project was added,” she said. “They were also installed in non-traditional spaces, in and outside of the museum, transforming the museum into a Chanukah lamp.”
Unlike the Jewish Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum is not a culturally specific institution, so the field of modern art is wide open to her. She also will oversee the museum’s permanent collection of contemporary art.
Zuckerman-Jacobson has eight special exhibits on her agenda for the 1999-2000 academic year — twice as many as presented in past years. She also wants to switch the focus from local artists to those in New York and Europe.
“I plan to bring the best artists from around the world — the people who are shaping our contemporary culture,” she said.
In most cases, the artists will come to Berkeley for the installation of their exhibit. While there, Zuckerman-Jacobson said, the artists will take part in informal talks, classroom lectures and receptions with students.
Zuckerman-Jacobson also has a plan for getting the attention of students, who don’t tend to visit the museum even though they are automatically enrolled as members. She said she is going to bring the artwork to them by placing two of the eight exhibits outside of the museum.
“When you’re an undergraduate, that’s the time when the mind is most open to ideas,” she said. “It’s a prime time to expose [people to art]. Then they continue to be invested throughout their lives.”
Bringing art into the everyday environment is nothing new for Zuckerman-Jacobson. While living in New York, she and her husband, Christopher Jacobson, a musician, opened an “alternative exhibit and performance space.” That’s a fancy way of saying that they displayed artwork, accompanied by musical arrangements, in a storefront on the Lower East Side.
“In this way people could engage the work as part of their community,” Zuckerman-Jacobson said. “There were people standing on the street looking at the work and talking about what it meant. [There were] no signs saying ‘This is an art project.’ People figured out what it meant and assigned their own meaning.”