Sculptor Jim Jacobson: Shaping San Luis Obispo s Public Art Landscape

Jim Jacobson, Seven Sisters Bridge. | Photo: Sarah Linn.

At first glance, the red handrail that spans San Luis Obispo's Santa Rosa Street bridge seems ordinary enough. Look closer, and you'll see the repeating squiggles are actually the outlines of the Seven Sisters, the craggy volcanic peaks that define the San Luis Obispo County skyline, rendered in powder-coated steel.

Look closer still, and you'll realize that the design -- sinuous shapes framed by rectangles and topped with square nubs -- subtly echoes a similar motif decorating the nearby Kundert Medical Clinic designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s. It's no coincidence, either, that the railing is painted Cherokee red, Wright's favorite color.

It's probably one of my more admired pieces, acknowledged San Luis Obispo sculptor Jim Jacobson, whose Seven Sisters Bridge was installed in 2000. And it's just one example of how Jacobson has helped shaped the Central Coast's public art landscape with thoughtful pieces rooted in the region's past.

Jim always tells a story of who we are, said Betsy Kiser, who oversaw San Luis Obispo's Public Art Program as director of the Parks and Recreation Department. He ties together time and place and history.

I've taken an interest in our local heritage, Jacobson said, although, he added, I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with the way accenting the history of the site makes you feel more a part of your community. You have a better understanding of what has gone in the past, not just what you see today, the sculptor said.

San Luis Obispo sculptor Jim Jacobson poses with one of his creations, an untitled abstract sculpture. | Photo: Sarah Linn.

Jacobson, who hails from Humboldt County, never planned to be a starving artist, as he puts it. After graduating from Sacramento State University with a bachelor's degree in business administration, he entered the Peace Corps in 1969.

His first post found him serving as an auditor for cocoa and coffee cooperatives in the west African country of Ghana. I made a mobile for my little one-room apartment out of calabashes and bamboo, Jacobson recalled. That was the beginning of my interest in design.

Back in the United States, he started building wooden mobiles. The hobby followed him as he and his family moved from Washington, D.C., to Micronesia to Saipan to Botswana; he even exhibited his work at the National Museum & Art Gallery in Gaborone, Botswana, in the mid-1970s.

Jacobson and his family eventually settled on the Central Coast, moving 30 years ago into a hillside home on the southern outskirts of San Luis Obispo. (Jacobson, who supplemented his master's degree in public administration with a handful of arts classes, designed the sleek structure himself.) It's here that his hobby has blossomed into a full-bore profession.

Jim Jacobson, Flames of Knowledge. | Photo: Jim Jacobson.

Jacobson's first public art project was Flames of Knowledge, a large-scale metal mobile positioned in front of the city of San Luis Obispo's Parks and Recreation Department. Playful shapes in primary colors recall the property's past as the site of Emerson School.

At the time I didn't know how to weld and yet I proposed a piece of sculpture that required welding, quipped Jacobson, who recruited the help of two expert San Luis Obispo fabricators, Brad Cliff and Doug Brewster. (He also apprenticed with Brewster, a Cal Poly faculty member.)

Flames of Knowledge, installed in 1998, marked Jacobson's transition from wood to more durable, weather-resistant materials such as powder-coated, stainless and Cor-Ten weathering steel. It also signaled the start of a new career. That's what moved me from a desk job to working full-time as an artist, he explained.

Over the decades, Jacobson has developed a visual vocabulary that's instantly recognizable to anyone who's seen his free-standing sculptures, mobiles and wall reliefs. Even my grandchildren, when they were two or three walking through downtown [San Luis Obispo], would go, Oh, there's grandpa's sculpture.' They'd recognize it, he said. It says something about an artist when he has a style that he's been able to pull out of [his] mind or what is pleasing and stimulating to him.

According to Jacobson, he gets his interest in Art Deco and midcentury modernist design from Wright, his love of mobiles and kinetic sculpture from Alexander Calder and his passion for bright colors from Joan Miro. And then there's his fascination with human history and the natural world.

Sculputures by Jim Jacobson. | Photo: Sarah Linn.

Take the trio of sculptures he designed for downtown sites at San Luis Obispo Creek near Mission Plaza. Chumash celebrates the first inhabitants of the San Luis Obispo area with human-like figures based on ancient pictographs, while Fish Life calls attention to two types of native fish -- steelhead trout and three-spined stickleback -- and Sycamore and Budding Thistle pays lyric tribute to the Chorro Creek bog thistle and California sycamore. All three sculptures were installed in 1999.

Jacobson revisited the Chumash pictograph motif in 2003's Haku, located in downtown Lompoc. A sculpture, he said, shouldn't just be a piece of art that looks nice. It should represent the site it's at in terms of the environment.

Jacobson collaborated with glass artist Will Carlton and graphic designer Erick Wand to create the obelisk The American Spirit, installed in 2003 at the corner of Osos and Palm Streets in front of San Luis Obispo's City Hall. Befittingly located in close proximity to a bus transfer station, the totemic sculpture, which pairs images of a grizzly bear and a palm tree with stylized wheels and tire trac

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/sculptor-jim-jacobson-shaping-san-...
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