Flo Talks! by Amy Taubin

Flo Jacobs (1941-2025)

Flo Jacobs (born Florence Karpf), who died this June, will forever be associated with her husband and creative partner Ken Jacobs. An excellent painter in her own right, Flo devoted herself in countless ways to Ken’s film work for more than sixty years. Inseparable and interconnected, bound by love and art, they created an unparalleled body of work that grew out of an expanded the art form that brought them together—painting. Strong-willed, generous, and singular, Flo was in some ways the quiet partner, a woman of relatively few words in comparison to the ever-voluble Ken. Flo was universally loved, but may have also been underappreciated as an iconoclast and an artistic genius. The in-depth and revelatory interview attached below, by the great critic Amy Taubin, is essential reading, providing endless insight into Flo’s remarkable personal and artistic journey.

Interview by Amy Taubin, for the book Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford University Press, 2011)