Ray “Jake” Jacobson, visual artist; Professor Emeritus, Carleton College.
Ray Jacobson was born into a hard working Utah farm family in 1920. Struggling with his
family through the withering drought and the depression of the 1930’s, “he plowed the land,
planted the seeds, cut, stacked and threshed the grain, fed it to animals, milled it into flour, and
savored the farm-made bread.” His ties to the land and to nature, along with the notion of
public service and the desire to improve the lives of those around him, has informed his art.
In 1941, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ray interrupted his formal artistic education
to enlist in the Naval Air Corps where he was trained as a carrier-based diver bomber pilot.
After the war he completed his MFA in Art at the University of Colorado and began teaching,
first at the invitation of his alma mater, then at Baylor University and the University of Indiana,
before coming to Northfield in 1955. He spent the remainder of his teaching career at Carleton
College, thirty-one years rich, simultaneously working as a professional artist, exhibiting his
work nationally, winning awards and receiving commissions for his sculptures.
Of his several sculptures that grace Northfield, two of the most notable ones are “Bridge
Square Fountain, commissioned by Sheldahl, Inc, and “Harvest,” celebrating Northfield’s
sesquicentennial, the materials for which were funded in large part by Malt-O-Meal, and for
which Ray donated his time and energies as a gift to the city.
Ray Jacobson’s patience as a teacher who gave generously of his time and wisdom to his
students is as well remembered by his colleagues, as is his consummate professionalism that
would never allow him to sacrifice quality for expediency.
There may be no more fitting summation of Jake’s legacy as an artist than that penned by
Albert Eisen, Art Historian and Professor of Art Law in the School of Law of Law at Stanford
University, who says:
It is for the Ray Jacobsons to put in town squares, public libraries, shopping
malls and on college campuses viewer friendly art: poetic objects that resist
verbal paraphrase or one shot interpretations, and which confront the ordinary
with the extraordinary, the mundane with the mystifying, the dead-pan with the
expressive.
If only Jake’s drawings existed and not his sculptures, by their quantity and
quality they would give us the measure of a professional artist and his pride of
mind and hand. ... Taken with the sculpture, however, Carleton students and
colleagues have been exposed to a legacy every educated person can respect
and admire. Ray Jacobson’s art gives the modern artist a good name.
Ray Jacobson’s contributions give Northfield more than a good name. Through his mentorship
of young artists, through his attachment to the community and through his generous gifts of
lasting and uplifting sculptures to the city, Northfield is a better place. Accordingly, Ray
Jacobson, is deemed a Northfield living treasure.
Ray was nominated for the award by Paul and Barbara Krause and Dennis Wilcox.