Ann Arbor artist Judith Jacobs’ digital fine artworks are inspired by pop culture and street culture. She creates artworks from a variety of sources, including photographs; image files given to her by friends; and scans of things like newsprint, comic books, or the odd piece of detritus that she finds on the street.

With a background in printmaking, collage, and painting, Jacobs ended up discovering Photoshop about 10 years ago. Now she plays around with scanners and inkjet printers to create her art. 

Jacobs explains, “I found that Photoshop was a really interesting extension of my paper and paste collage work because in Photoshop you can create layers, and combine them, and recombine them, and alter them right there on the screen.”

Although Jacobs is fascinated by pop culture and street culture, she admits, “I’m not really a part of it. I’m a middle-class woman of a certain age. Maybe it makes me feel young, I don’t know,” she laughs. Reviewing Jacobs' last 10 years, you will find lots of graffiti, ripped posters on city walls, newsprint and advertisements, comic book heroes, and an entire series on Cracker Jacks, as well as other pop-culture imagery she has collected. She uses “whatever suggests itself to me,” she explains.

Comic-book imagery appears in some of her artworks, but she says, “I don’t read comic books. I have a collection of horror comic books that I haven’t used yet. My artist friends give me comic books as presents, but I don’t read them. I like the look.”

Some of the imagery she uses comes from her travels: “I find that Ann Arbor is an incredibly clean place. There’s not much in the way of really good graffiti or junk. So I collect things when I travel.”

While traveling in Europe, “I remember they put the same poster all over a fence or a wall. The posters weren’t inherently interesting in themselves, but the whole look of the duplicated posters — I really liked it.

“Usually I don’t have a theme in mind when I sit down to work. Each work is a problem that you need to solve aesthetically,” she relates. Jacobs explains that her artistic process for creating digital fine art “is very much the collage process. I throw a whole bunch of disparate things together and push them around, and push them together in a way that I like — that pleases me aesthetically. I think all art is problem solving,” she says.

One of her favorite artists is Robert Rauschenberg, who created combine paintings and mixed-media artworks out of things he collected. “My inspiration is collecting all kinds of materials and combining them. Rauschenberg’s work sometimes had political overtones...I don’t really have a serious theme like that. I like the look of pop culture and street culture,” Jacobs says.

Growing up in Ann Arbor, she took drawing classes as a kid and spent two summers at Interlochen Center for the Arts, before attending the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Design. In her early career, Jacobs worked in mixed media creating combines, collages, and monotypes — one of a kind prints. In 1996, she co-published a book containing photographs of her early collages and poems by Laurence W. Thomas, entitled "The Face in the Mirror."

Jacobs remembers several moments in her early artistic career when she started experimenting with new ways of combining imagery that “eventually evolved into my digital work,” she says. In one instance, she used a copier to create collages out of black and white posters.

Later, when spending time in the Netherlands with her husband, she “collected the colored packets for tea bags, city maps, labels from canned vegetables, ads for local sales — other materials I found anywhere and everywhere there. I had them color-photocopied and then combined parts of them with painted and monotype-printed papers in paper-and-paste collages,” Jacobs remembers.

Jacobs was recently awarded second prize in the Ann Arbor Art Center’s “The Print” statewide juried exhibition. She has curated and contributed artwork to numerous exhibitions over the years.

In the last year, Jacobs has started doing Chine-collé — the process of pasting pieces of paper with different textures and qualities onto a larger sheet of paper and printing on it. “The different papers take the ink in different ways,” she explains. She is also finding that the technique allows new possibilities for how she layers paper and digital imagery.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.

Photos by Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Top: Digital artist Judith Jacobs stands next to her piece "Post No Bills 2" in her Ann Arbor home.
Right: Digital artist Judith Jacobs holds her work "Riffing" in her Ann Arbor home.
Lower: Digital artist Judith Jacobs sits under three of her works in her Ann Arbor home.