Tuesday Editions: Jacob Escobedo

Tuesday greetings from your wayward curator, my collector friends! I am back, and determined to stay put in NYC for the balance of the very merry month of May. I'm obligated to, in fact; I've got a calendar full of excellent events to keep me busy! This week's already off to a roaring start after a very full Monday. I had an amazing lunch with my new BFF Tim Walker, who I met in Hyères, and then spent the evening amongst some of my favorite people, all convened at Jane Mount's studio for the Hey, Hot Shot! panel review.

The coming days promise an equally brisk pace. I'm holding out hope that I'll be able to snag a ticket for tonight's ICP Infinity Awards — where Tim and my #1 photo crush, Rinko Kawauchi, are being honored. On Wednesday, I'll be venturing into the borough of Brooklyn for the opening of the New York Photo Festival. Their impressive array of events and exhibitions guarantees that I'll be practically living under the Manhattan bridge through the weekend. Other items on my ridiculously ambitious cultural agenda: the Post-War and Contemporary Art auction previews — I'm especially keen to check out the lot of Ruscha books at Christie's — and taking Tim on a jaunt uptown to the Cooper Hewitt for a lunch date with Gregory Krum.

It's a big week on 20x200 too; we've got double editions on tap for today and tomorrow, and on Thursday, we'll release a pair of editions from the brilliant Penelope Umbrico. I've been making a public spectacle of myself talking about her work for months now, so it's an honor to be collaborating with her on 20x200 editions. Proceeds from one of Penelope's editions will benefit Aperture, an organization that I am similarly honored to be associated with, and one most worthy! I'll have more to say on that later in the week, but for now, it's high time that we turn our attention to today's editions from 20x200 favorite Jacob Escobedo.

Brandon and Jake are the newest members of Jacob's growing 20x200 clique, joining the previously released Kerry and Sophie. Each of these delightfully intricate and a-little-bit-creepy-in-the-best-possible-way drawings represent the favorite animal of the friend that they are drawn for.* The idea that you can deepen your connections with people via a dialogue about their affection for animals is something that resonates with me. I've had a number of intense conversations with friends lately about the topic; the complexities of our feelings for creatures are a fascinating prism through which to examine human relationships. It's rich fodder for conversation, poetry and art.

While in Chicago for NEXT, I met up with animal-loving Hot Shot Colleen Plumb. Our review of the latest edit of her Animals are Outside Today project sparked one of those conversations, which in turn inspired a recent pairing on Personism. I coupled her work with an excerpt from Whitman's Leaves of Grass that I'd discovered in the preface of Bertrand Russell's Conquest of Happiness. The snippet happens to pair well with Jacob's work too:

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

And with that, my friends, I'm off to pick out a party dress and confirm plans for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow with a couple of photography editions that you're sure to enjoy. See you then!

*I'm angling for a long distance friendship with the Altanta-based Jacob, hoping to add an otter to our midst!