Artist Talk: Joan Jonas
Advance Insider tickets available Friday, August 21, 7 PM (space is limited). General tickets available Monday, August 24, 7 PM.
Join us for an intimate conversation with pioneering multimedia artist Joan Jonas. Widely recognized as one of the founding figures of American performance art, Jonas began bridging film and video, installation and sculpture, and body art in the mid-1960s, often experimenting with movement, mirrors, and natural forces to forward her inquiry into perception.
The program celebrates a joint acquisition of two watershed Jonas artworks by two American centers of modern and contemporary art scholarship, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and The Gund at Kenyon College. The artworks—a multimedia installation, Mirror Pieces Installation II (1969/2014), and the film Wind (1968)—are strong representations of the artist’s early work and the first by Jonas to enter both collections.
Jonas is joined in conversation by Marina Isgro, curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Daisy Desrosiers, curatorial and strategic lead at The Gund/Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North America, at Tate Modern.
About the speakers
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York City) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media, including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas’s experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Daisy Desrosiers is the Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North America, at Tate, where she supports the research, acquisition, and stewardship of modern and contemporary art from across the continent. She also serves as curatorial and strategic lead at The Gund at Kenyon College, where she previously held the role of director and chief curator and led the museum through a period of significant growth, including its accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums. An art historian, curator, and museum leader, Desrosiers is known for her artist-centered approach to exhibitions, collections, and institutional practice. Her recent projects include co-curating the 15th Shanghai Biennale, and she has collaborated with artists including Joan Jonas, Ming Smith, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, Christine Sun Kim, Vivian Suter, and Marie Watt. Her work explores the role of museums and collections as spaces for learning, dialogue, and public engagement.
Marina Isgro is curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn and currently serves as interim head curator. Since joining the Museum in 2020, she has curated the exhibitions Laurie Anderson: The Weather, John Akomfrah: Purple, Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960, and OSGEMEOS: Endless Story, as well as live performances by artists including Yvonne Rainer. Isgro was previously a fellow at the Harvard Art Museums and has published essays on time-based media in Artforum, Art Journal, Tate Papers, and other publications. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Princeton University.
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks’ advance notice is recommended but not required.
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