John P. Jacob

During the 1980s, he taught classes on color Xerox and the rubber stamp as a print-making medium, at Pratt Manhattan, with mail-artist Ed Plunkett, and founded the Riding Beggar Press ("If wishes were horses...") to promote his and other artists' work.

[9] Since the mid-1980s, Jacob has worked with artists in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, guest-curating exhibitions for institutions in the United States and Europe, including the Liget Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle (Saale), Germany.

Émigré writer Jerzy Kosinski contributed an introductory statement to the exhibition Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography (1987), describing the work presented as "the penultimate art of spiritual confrontation".

[11] The American photographer and theorist Diane Neumaier, in her history of Soviet non-conformist photography, credited Jacob's work as foundational to that of later historians such as herself.

Jacob's exhibitions for the PRC include There is No Eye, a retrospective of photographer/musician John Cohen (2002),[14][15] and Facing Death: Portraits from Cambodia’s Killing Fields (with Robert E. Seydel, 1997).

[16] Other exhibitions Jacob curated for the PRC explored the intersections of photography with dance and music,[17][18][19][20] including the first presentation of photographs by Lou Reed.