Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art features modern and contemporary art by generationally and culturally disparate artists whose works engage in one way or another with Buddhist precepts and rituals. Video, installation, painting, photography, and performance art by Sanford Biggers, Theaster Gates, Atta Kim, Wolfgang Laib, and Charmion von Wiegand explore the ways in which Buddhism has been incorporated into the lives of people across cultures, opening up a discussion about the practice.

Since the emergence of the conceptual art movement in the 1960s, Western artists have taken up the Buddhist precepts of emptiness and impermanence and examined the ways in which they intersect with our everyday lives. Grain of Emptiness features five inheritors of that mid-century tradition.

Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art, Martin Brauen and Mary Jane Jacob, Rubin Museum of Art, Hardcover, 2010, 136 Pages, $60.00

Mary Jane Jacob is a curator and writer who pioneered public, site-specific, and socially engaged art in the US as a shared practice and public discourse through landmark exhibitions "Places with a Past" and "Places with a Future" in Charleston, South Carolina; "Culture in Action" in Chicago; and "Conversations at the Castle" in Atlanta. She also served as the Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles, where she staged some of the first US exhibitions of some of leading avant-garde artists. Jacob has probed creative practioners' relationship to audiences and society in the co-edited volumes "Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art," "Learning Mind: Experience into Art," "Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds Changed Society," "The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists," and the "Chicago Social Practice History Series." Her most recent book is "Dewey for Artists" published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. Jacob is currently organizing a major exhibition of Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz opening at the Tate Modern London opening June 2020. Mary Jane Jacob is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she is Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice.

CONTENTS: Grain of Emptiness
Forword	7
Supporters and Lenders	8
Acknowledgments	9
Preface Martin Brauen	11
ESSAYS Mary Jane Jacob
Introduction	25
Wofgang Laib	29
Charmion von Wiegand	39
Sanford Biggers	46
Atta Kim	55
Theaster Gates	63
PLATES	77
Works in the Exhibition	129
Artist Biographies	131
Selected Bibliography	133