The Sid Jacobson JCC has opened its 2025-26 artSPACE season with a major exhibition featuring the work of acclaimed New York-based photographer Kathy Howard Jacobson, a longtime Honorary Board member of the JCC.
The exhibit showcases decades of her work, from street photography and portraiture to abstract explorations that highlight what she calls “the beauty in details unseen.”
Jacobson’s catalogue spans five decades, reflecting both her evolution as an artist and her engagement with the city around her.
Her projects include essays on homelessness, New York City’s garment district and Chinatown, as well as her celebrated “Urban Paintings” series, which capture layered, peeling walls and urban textures that reflect the social, political, and emotional fabric of city life.
Her most recent work moves inward, focusing on intimate, reflective, and abstract moments in everyday environments.
“I have been photographing for fifty years,” Jacobson said. “As a photographer, I have gained access to people and places that I would not have had the opportunity to explore otherwise. My camera allows me to look at the world and to make pictures of how I personally see it. When I am immersed in photography, it is where I am meant to be.”
Jacobson’s journey into photography began as a teenager, when she was inspired by her older sister, who was an artist and photographer.
“I wanted to be just like her,” Jacobson said. “She was doing photography and painting, and I gravitated to visual projects of all kinds. That put a camera in my hand for the first time.”
She earned her undergraduate degree in visual arts and communications at Emerson College, with a minor in speech, and her MFA from CW Post.
Her early work was grounded in photojournalism and portraiture. Notably, she spent two years photographing homelessness in New York City, gaining intimate access to shelters, soup kitchens, and temporary housing facilities.
That body of work was a defining moment in her career, blending social awareness with artistic vision.
After having her son in the late 1980s, Jacobson took a step back from exhibiting her work, although she continued photographing.
“I made a conscious decision to focus my energy on raising my son,” she said. “I kept photographing but didn’t exhibit for decades. I shared my work with family and friends, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I began showing publicly again.”
Her recent exhibitions, including a major show in West Palm Beach, marked a new phase in her career. They blended abstraction with social and urban commentary.
Jacobson’s “Urban Paintings,” a series documenting peeled posters and layered walls across city landscapes, started in Boston in the mid-1970s.
Over decades, she continued to photograph these urban surfaces, creating a body of work that she calls both personal and socially resonant.
“Kathy’s work captures both the seen and unseen with remarkable vision,” said Jaime Teich, associate executive director of marketing and communications and curator of artSPACE in a press release. “To feature her photographs within our artSPACE is to not only honor her extraordinary talent but also the unique perspective she brings as part of the JCC family.”
Jacobson has a personal connection to the Sid Jacobson JCC: she is the daughter-in-law of Sid Jacobson and served on the board for nearly 30 years.
“It feels fitting to show my work here, given my long connection to the JCC and my relationship with my father-in-law,” she said. “Photography was something we shared, and being on the board together was an incredibly special experience for me.”
Currently, Jacobson splits her time between Southampton and Manhattan, spending winters in Florida.
She has been reflecting on her career and preparing a retrospective that will encompass five decades of work. This will allow her to evaluate her evolution as an artist and look forward to future projects.
For emerging photographers, Jacobson offers practical advice: “You just have to photograph a lot. Allow yourself to take pictures of anything that calls to you, even if you don’t use every image. Over time, meaningful images surface from consistent practice.”
She said that photography is both a personal and social exploration, offering access to perspectives and moments that would otherwise go unseen.
The Sid Jacobson JCC exhibition, featuring Jacobson’s “Urban Paintings,” runs through November in the center’s 90-foot artSPACE gallery. The show highlights her talent, vision, and decades-long commitment to capturing the urban landscape and the human condition.
For more information about the exhibition, visit sjjcc.org/artspace.
