Jane Dickson began her formal career in 1978 after studying at Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Having moved to New York, she became a participant in the emerging downtown arts community then beginning to incorporate a number of disparate groups of artists, rock musicians, and hip-hop pioneers. After meeting Charlie Ahearn, Dickson joined Colab; she and Ahearn married in 1983. In 1980, Colab secured funding for and presented the Times Square Show, a multidisciplinary exhibit that gathered the work of over a hundred artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and David Hammons and which proved to have long-lasting influence on curatorial programming. In 1982, Dickson proposed and coordinated the āMessages to the Publicā series for the Public Art Fund, displaying art texts on the Spectracolor LED billboard in Times Square.