MARY JANE JACOB is a curator who aims to advance the parameters of artists’ public practices and examine assumptions about the audience for contemporary art.  Creating over 50 exhibitions and commissioning over 100 artists’ projects, in 1990 she shifted her workplace from the museum to the street. (In the 1980s she was chief curator at MCA/Chicago and MoCA/Los Angeles) Critically engaging the discourse around public space, she began to organize site and community-based programs—“Places with a Past,” “Culture in Action,” “Conversations at The Castle,” “Evoking History,” “Places with a Future”—each comprised of deeply situated local projects by the artists she invited and with whom she also often collaborated.  With the book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2004), marking the culmination of a multi-year national consortium research effort which she co-organized, she furthered her research into the ways of artmaking and the nature of the art experience. Mary Jane Jacob is Executive Director of Exhibitions and Professor of Sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.