Cheryl Jacobsen
calligrapher and assemblage artist
Biographical Info
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Cheryl Jacobsen is a calligrapher and assemblage artist interested in collaborations, materiality, expressive marks, the work of past scribes, teaching, and especially living in Iowa City where she can pursue all these things on a regular basis.
She is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book, where she teaches classes on the history of western letterforms and modern calligraphic hands. In 2015 she was a visiting faculty member for the 2015 NEH Summer Seminar The Materiality of Medieval Manuscripts: Interpretation Through Production. Cheryl is the author of “A Modern Scribe Views Scribes of the Past” in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts (Brepols, 2013).
She also runs a freelance studio creating commercial lettering, documents, calligraphic art, and manuscript books. The latest is a facsimile of the Beowulf manuscript on goatskin.
Over the past twenty years, assemblage has grown into an obsessive occupation: “I have collected a crowded basement full of rusty/odd/cool/discarded things that need to be combined with other rusty/odd/cool/discarded things. I think of myself as a matchmaker for these objects and find immense pleasure when I can put them together in the ways they need to be despite what they were originally made for.” A show of her most recent assemblages, “Strong,” opens on Friday, November 20, at Hudson River Gallery in Coralville. Find out more at cheryljacobsen.com.
