Wendy Jacob

Wendy W. Jacob (born March 27, 1958) is an American artist who works as an urban interventionist.

Wendy Jacob received her bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1980, and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago.

She has created installations and interventions in social spaces since 1989, and has developed a distinct body of sculptural works which investigate the interface between architecture and the bodies of the people and animals who inhabit the built environment. Jacob is also a member of the Chicago-based collaborative Haha, whose work focuses on the exploration of social positions relative to a particular site, and which has produced over two dozen influential projects since the late 1980s. She received the Creative Capital Visual Arts Award in the year 2000.

One of Jacob's collaborations has been the creation of the Squeeze Chair, inspired by Temple Grandin's hug machine. For several years in the 1990s, Jacob has worked with Grandin in developing furniture that squeezes or 'hugs' users.

She has worked as an associate professor of visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jacob has had solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City), the Madison Art Center (Madison, Wisconsin, 1999), the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1998), MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan,1998), and the Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, Illinois)1997), and many other galleries and institutions in the United States and Europe. Her work resides in the collections of Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France; Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain (fr), Poitou-Charentre, Poitier, France; Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain, Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; and the MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois.