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 89) New York City, 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 July 13, 1936) is a famous American visual artist. She is known as a pioneer of video art and performance art. In the late 1960s, she became a key figure in creating these new art forms.

Jonas's work combines performance, video, and objects. She helped make video performance art a popular medium for artists. Her ideas have influenced many other types of art, including conceptual art and theater. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Early Life and Education

Joan Jonas was born in New York City in 1936. She earned a degree in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958. Later, she studied sculpture and drawing in Boston. In 1965, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Columbia University.

During the 1960s, Jonas was part of the exciting art scene in downtown New York. She studied dance with choreographer Trisha Brown for two years. She also worked with other important choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.

Exploring New Kinds of Art

Even though Jonas started as a sculptor, she soon began to explore new ideas. By 1968, she was mixing performance with video and props. She often performed outdoors in cities or natural landscapes.

The Mirror Pieces (1968-1971)

Between 1968 and 1971, Jonas created a series of performances called Mirror Pieces. In these works, she used mirrors as a central prop. The mirrors represented ideas about identity, how we see ourselves, and the difference between what is real and what is imaginary.

In one famous piece called Wind (1968), Jonas filmed performers moving stiffly across a windy landscape. The wind made their simple movements seem mysterious and emotional.

Video Performances in the 1970s

In 1970, Jonas traveled to Japan with the sculptor Richard Serra. There, she saw traditional Japanese theater like Noh and Kabuki. This trip inspired her, and she bought her first video camera.

From 1972 to 1976, her video performances featured only herself. She performed in her New York apartment as a character she invented called Organic Honey. Jonas described this character as a "mysterious electronic figure." Through this character, she explored ideas about the female image and how women's roles in society were changing.

• Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972): In this video, Jonas used a camera to show fragmented images of her own body on a screen.
• Songdelay (1973): This film was inspired by her trip to Japan. It used special camera lenses to create strange effects with distance and space. The movements in the film were sharp and rhythmic, like the Japanese performers she had seen.

Jonas once said that she liked video because it was a new art form. It wasn't dominated by male artists like painting and sculpture had been. This gave her the freedom to explore new ideas.

Storytelling and Later Works

In 1976, Jonas created The Juniper Tree. This work was based on a fairy tale by the Grimm Brothers. She used a colorful set, recorded sound, and storytelling to tell the tale of a wicked stepmother. This marked a shift toward using stories from myths, poems, and folk songs in her art.

In the 1990s, Jonas created her My New Theater series. These pieces were smaller and did not always require her to be in the performance. They were like small, portable theaters that explored different subjects, from a dancer in Cape Breton Island to the simple act of drawing a landscape.

Her 2002 work, Lines in the Sand, was based on a poem about Helen of Troy. In this performance, she explored ideas about the self and the body.

Teaching Career

Joan Jonas has also been a teacher for many years.

• From 1993, she taught a course in 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 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is now a Professor Emerita, which is a special title for retired professors who have made important contributions.

Exhibitions and Performances

Jonas has performed and shown her work all over the world.

Performances

She has performed at many famous venues, including:

• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1974)
• The Kitchen, New York (1975)
• San Francisco Museum of Art (1976)
• The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Dia:Beacon (2006)
• Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2008)

Solo Exhibitions

Jonas has had many solo exhibitions, where her art was the main focus. Some of these include:

• Stedelijk Museum (1994)
• Joan Jonas: Five Works, Queens Museum of Art (2003)
• Joan Jonas. Light Time Tales, HangarBicocca, Milan (2014)
• Joan Jonas, Tate Modern (2018)
• Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Venice (2019)

Group Exhibitions

Jonas has also been part of many important group shows, such as:

• Documenta in Kassel, Germany (she has participated six times since 1972).
• Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007).
• In 2015, she represented the United States of America at the Venice Biennale, one of the most important art events in the world.

Awards and Recognition

Joan Jonas has received many awards for her groundbreaking work in art.

• She has been given grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation.
• In 1989, she won the Maya Deren Award for Video.
• In 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award.
• In 2018, she won the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Art.
• In 2023, she was elected as an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Public Collections

Jonas's artwork is part of the collections of many major museums, including:

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

See also

In Spanish: Joan Jonas para niños