MoMA presents the most comprehensive retrospective of Joan Jonas in the USA

From March 17 through July 7, 2024, the Museum of Modern Art presents Joan Jonas, the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, spanning more than 50 years of her remarkable career

Source: Museum of Modern Art · Image: Joan Jonas. Mirror Piece I. 1969. Performance, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Courtesy the artist. Image via moma.org

The exhibition features works produced from 1968 through the present, including videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs, and major installations and performances—many of which are being revisited and reconfigured by the artist on the occasion of this exhibition. Joan Jonas also presents extensive corresponding archival materials, as well as newly commissioned oral histories highlighting Jonas’s enduring multimedia legacy for generations of younger artists. Joan Jonas is organized by Ana Janevski, Curator, with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Media and Performance. With thanks to Molly Superfine, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, and Brandon Eng and Piper Marshall, former Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellows, Department of Media and Performance.

“It’s been exciting to reconsider old and newer works as they relate in a new context. I am very happy to have the work on exhibition in New York, where I have lived most of my life,” said Jonas, who is working closely with the curatorial team.

“This highly anticipated exhibition will give an overview of Jonas’s unique role as a trailblazing figure of video and performance. It will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape,” said Janevski. “The exhibition also advances the Museum’s commitment to representing the work of key women artists whose practices have been deeply influential in the history of performance, media, and feminist art practices.” Jonas began her career as a sculptor, and it was not until attending workshops with choreographers from Judson Dance Theater in the late 1960s that she would refocus her artistic practice on experimentation with performance and technology. Organized chronologically, this retrospective highlights four major themes that are present throughout Jonas’s multidisciplinary body of work: performance, technology, literature, and ecology. The exhibition will also foreground how Jonas uses her own works as archival material—with each project building.