Campbell was on a straightforward engineering track through most of college. Then, he recalls, “I realized I could get sucked into being an antisocial nerd, and started looking for balance.” He took some photograph and filmmaking classes—and liked it so much that he took a job in video production and spent a semester studying film in graduate school before settling into the job at Faroudja and working on art projects on the weekends.
He never stopped wanting to be more than a garage artist, however, and he approached galleries in San Francisco for years. Then, in 1988, he created a pop-up gallery himself, joining a friend to rent space in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood for a two-week exhibition. A curator for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) came to the show and, with help from Gap founder Donald Fisher, acquired a piece for the museum. That work was “Hallucination,” an interactive video installation that visually set people on fire. SFMOMA put it on display in 1990.
More museum acquisitions by SFMOMA and others followed, but it still took a while before Campbell says he was comfortable calling himself an artist. He continued with his engineering job until 2009, though steadily dialed back the hours he spent at Faroudja.
Campbell loves both engineering and art, but says trying to make a career out of both felt “schizophrenic. The engineering and art parts of my brain are separate.” He even found himself using two names—Jack for his Silicon Valley career, Jim in the art world. At least then, when he got a phone call, he knew what the caller might be wanting. Finally, with a young child also demanding his time, he gave up the engineering job.
“That was a hard decision,” he says, “because I liked the engineering almost as much as the art. Most people would say, given the choice, ‘Of course you’ll choose art.’ But I do miss engineering.”
In addition to the Salesforce Tower, you can see Campbell’s work at the SFMOMA, which owns a number of pieces and is now showing one called “Tilted Plane.” Another piece, “Jacob’s Dram: A Luminous Light,” hangs from the ceiling of Grace Cathedral. Outside of San Francisco, his public art appears in the San Diego airport, in the Des Moines Civic Center, and in several other cities around the world.