Exhibits & Events

This is a show about idea-having, gathering, storing, and stealing.

There are some moments of long time, time to iterate on shapes and colors and the lines of an eyebrow when it is in disbelief for many minutes, even hours. There are more moments of short time. A twenty-minute dash to doodle the gestures of seven toddlers learning to cartwheel. Ideas happen in fits and starts.

I have learned to pickpocket. If I notice that I am hearing or seeing an idea, I stash it. I write it on a post-it. I doodle it on a napkin. I put it down and place it in a pocket. You’re invited to do the same.

Here are the beginnings of doodles, paintings, collages, sculptures. These are the mostly unfinished things, lots of notions that I put in my pocket once. Some of these carry a hope to shape into something bigger—a book, a novel, a large format painting that will expand across thousands of walls.

Maybe these unfinished things are past moments of study that will not evolve. Maybe these are intimate items. Maybe they are not the start of any ultimate project, perhaps they are mechanisms that happen as time moves along.

Are they necessary then? They do get me from here to there. How do you get from here to there?

Pick up a thought, put it in your pocket, save it, savor it. Steal it back at a later date. Maybe it will become something giant and public and everyone will applaud you for it. Maybe it will be just yours, carrying you along as you wait in a line.

*Please don’t actually take anything from this exhibition except the little notebooks and pencils and your own ideas.

Artist Bio

Sarah Jacoby is the award-winning author and illustrator of such picture books as:
Doris, Can I Sit With You?, Forever Or a Day
Everything is Fine by Michelle Sumovich
So Much Snow by Kristen Schroeder
Rabbit and the Motorbike by Kate Hoefler
The Important thing about Margaret Wise Brown by Mac Barnett

Her work is mostly book-oriented these days, though she has worked with folks like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Sarah’s work is evocative and delightfully unexpected, playful and effortlessly profound. Her work is characterized by a deeply felt empathy, a keenly observant eye, and an intuitive ability to capture and convey what it means to think, feel, and be in this world as a human. She lives and works in Kensington, Philadelphia.

www.thesarahjacoby.com