Ken Jacobs

Up The Illusion

April 15 – November 26, 2023

Broadway Windows gallery

80WSE proudly presents Up The Illusion, a momentous survey exhibition celebrating the 90th birthday of Ken Jacobs, one of our most iconic and indefatigable moving image artists. Curated by artist and writer Andrew Lampert, this street level exhibition features a panoramic selection of Jacobs’ nearly 70 years of pioneering films and digital videos in the Broadway Windows gallery located on the corner of Broadway and E. 10th Street. 

Dating from the mid-1950s through today, and unfolding over the course of seven months, the thematically organized works displayed in each window will change three times over the course of the exhibition in order to spotlight the wildly divergent aspects of the artist’s prolific output. This is the first exhibition to feature Jacobs’ largely unseen drawings alongside his critically acclaimed moving image works. Experienced side-by-side, the painterly concerns and qualities at the heart of Jacobs’ distinctive multimedia approach are brought firmly into the foreground.

Called “one of the most extraordinary unknown personalities in the history of American movies” by critic J. Hoberman, Ken Jacobs (b.1933) is a key figure in the history of experimental cinema. A native New Yorker, Jacobs studied painting with Hans Hofmann in the early 1950s before embracing filmmaking and performance as his primary mediums. A central artist in the 1960s underground film movement, Jacobs’ decades of restless output includes more than forty short and feature length motion pictures. Working in tandem with his wife, Flo, he has created dozens of live performance pieces with their self-invented double 16mm “Nervous System” projection apparatus and nearly supernatural “Nervous Magic Lantern.” Since embracing video in 1999, he has produced well over 150 space, time and perception bending pieces that transpose his formal and 3D explorations into the digital dimension.