Joan Jonas facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Joan Jonas
Jonas in 2010
Born	Joan Amerman Edwards (1936-07-13) July 13, 1936 (age 88) New York City, New York, US
Education	Mount Holyoke College Columbia University
Known for	Video art, performance art, sculpture
Movement	Performance art
Awards	Maya Deren Award, 1989 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, 1995 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 1998 Kyoto Prize, 2018

Joan Jonas, born on July 13, 1936, is an American artist. She is known for being a pioneer in video and performance art. She was a very important artist in the performance art movement of the late 1960s. Her ideas and experiments helped create video performance art as a new way to make art. Her work also influenced conceptual art, theatre, and other visual arts. Joan Jonas lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Becoming an Artist

Joan Jonas was born in New York City in 1936. In 1958, she earned a degree in Art History from Mount Holyoke College. She later studied sculpture and drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston. In 1965, she received a master's degree in Sculpture from Columbia University.

While in New York in the 1960s, Jonas was part of the city's lively art scene. She studied with famous choreographers (people who create dances) like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve Paxton. These studies helped shape her unique art style.

Her Amazing Artworks

Joan Jonas started her career as a sculptor. But by 1968, she began to explore new ideas. She started mixing live performances with objects and video images. She often set her performances outdoors in cities, nature, or industrial areas.

Between 1968 and 1971, Jonas created Mirror Pieces. In these works, she used mirrors as a main part of her art. Mirrors became a symbol of looking at oneself, showing things, and telling the difference between what's real and what's imagined. Sometimes, the mirrors even added a bit of danger and connected with the audience.

In her 1968 film Wind, Jonas showed performers moving slowly against a strong wind. This made their movements look mysterious and thoughtful.

In 1970, Jonas traveled to Japan. There, she bought her first video camera. She also saw traditional Japanese theater like Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. These experiences influenced her art. She used drawings, costumes, masks, and recorded images to create interesting visual effects.

For example, in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas filmed parts of her own image on a video screen. In Disturbances (1973), she showed a woman swimming silently under another woman's reflection. Songdelay (1973) was filmed using special lenses that changed how deep the picture looked. This film was inspired by her trip to Japan, where she saw Noh performers clapping wood blocks and making sharp movements. Jonas explained that her early video art was a way to find a new, open style that was not dominated by men, unlike sculpture and painting.

In 1975, Jonas acted in the movie Keep Busy. This film was made by photographer Robert Frank and writer Rudy Wurlitzer.

In 1976, with The Juniper Tree, Jonas started using stories in her art. She took ideas from fairy tales, myths, poems, and folk songs. She created a complex, non-linear way of telling stories. The Juniper Tree used a colorful stage and recorded sounds to retell a Grimm Brothers fairy tale about an evil stepmother.

In the 1990s, Jonas created her My New Theater series. These works did not rely on her being physically present. The three pieces explored different ideas: a dancer from Cape Breton Island and his local culture; a dog jumping through a hoop while Jonas drew a landscape; and finally, a video about performing, using stones, costumes, and objects that held memories. She also created Revolted by the Thought of Known Places... (1992) and Woman in the Well (1996/2000).

For an art show called Documenta 11 in 2002, Jonas created Lines in the Sand. This performance and installation explored ideas about identity. It was based on the poem "Helen in Egypt" by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), which retells the myth of Helen of Troy. Jonas performed many of her early works at The Kitchen art space, including Funnel (1972) and Vertical Roll (1972). In The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things (2004), Jonas was inspired by the work of Aby Warburg on Hopi images.

Since 1970, Jonas has spent part of every summer in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She has also lived and worked in many other countries, including Greece, Morocco, India, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland, Poland, Hungary, and Ireland.

Jonas's early works in the 1960s and 70s were seen by many important artists of her time, such as Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, and Laurie Anderson. While she is very well-known in Europe, her groundbreaking performances are less known in the United States.

Her performance The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, inspired by German anthropologist Aby Warburg, was shown at Dia Beacon in 2005 and 2006. This project led to an ongoing partnership with pianist Jason Moran.

In 2014/2015, Joan Jonas designed a huge picture (176 square meters) for the Vienna State Opera. This was part of an exhibition series called Safety Curtain. Jonas also worked as a choreographer for Robert Ashley's opera Celestial Excursions in 2003.

Teaching Art

From 1993, Joan Jonas spent part of each year in Los Angeles. She taught a course called "New Genres" at the UCLA School of the Arts. In 1994, she became a full professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart in Germany. Since 1998, she has been a professor of visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is now a Professor Emerita (a retired professor who keeps her title) in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT.

Art Shows and Performances

Joan Jonas has shown her work and performed at many famous places around the world.

Performances

Some places where Jonas has performed her works include:

• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1974)
• The Kitchen, New York (1975)
• San Francisco Museum of Art (1976)
• Kunstmuseum Bern (2004)
• The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Dia:Beacon (2006)
• Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2008)
• PERFORMA 13 (2013)
• Art Night (2016)
• Oberlin College

Solo Exhibitions

Jonas has had many solo exhibitions (shows featuring only her work), such as:

• Stedelijk Museum (1994)
• Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles (2003)
• Pat Hearn Gallery, New York City (2003)
• Joan Jonas: Five Works, Queens Museum of Art (2003)
• Joan Jonas. Light Time Tales, HangarBicocca, Milan (2014)
• Safety Curtain., Vienna State Opera, Vienna (2014/15)
• what is found in the windowless house is true, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NY (2017)
• Joan Jonas, Tate Modern (2018)
• Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Venice (2019)
• Joan Jonas, Cinco Décadas, at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil (2020)

Group Exhibitions

Jonas has also been part of many international group exhibitions (shows with several artists), including:

• Documenta, Kassel, Germany (She has participated six times since 1972).
• Point of View: A Contemporary Anthology of the Moving Image, New Museum (2004)
• Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007)

In 2009, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale, a very important art event. In 2015, she represented the United States of America at the Venice Biennale. She was the sixth female artist to represent the United States there since 1990. In 2019, Jonas's work was shown in the Animalesque group show at Bildmuseet in Sweden.

Awards and Recognition

Joan Jonas has received many awards and grants for her work in choreography, video, and visual arts. These include awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD). She has also won the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize and the Polaroid Award for Video.

In 2009, Jonas received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2012, she was honored at The Kitchen Spring Gala Benefit. She was named Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon 2016. In 2018, Jonas won the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Art.

She has also received awards from Anonymous Was A Woman (1998), the Rockefeller Foundation (1990), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1976). In 2023, Jonas was chosen to be an Honorary Royal Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Where to Find Her Art

Joan Jonas's art can be seen in many public art museums and institutions, such as:

• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Tate Modern, London

Images for kids

• 

  Jonas in 2010

See also

In Spanish: Joan Jonas para niños