Joan Jonas: next move in a mirror world Book Launch

Wednesday, June 21, 2023, 6:30 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Register for the event here.

To celebrate the release of Dia’s latest publication, Joan Jonas will appear with curator Adrienne Edwards and scholar Heather Davis in conversation about the artist’s wide-ranging, five-decade career. The talk will explore topics covered in this first, major thematic monograph, including Jonas’s innovative approaches to media and performance; the politics of landscape and ecology; and more.

Joan Jonas: next move in a mirror world is published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of the artist’s work in nearly fifteen years, recently presented at Dia Beacon.

Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1958, and an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London (2018); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2019); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2019); and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2020). Jonas represented the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale and received the Kyoto Prize in 2018. Jonas is professor emerita at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where she curated a 2019 exhibition of the work of Jason Moran, Joan Jonas’s frequent collaborator, that originated in 2018 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Heather Davis is assistant professor of culture and media at the New School, New York. Davis’s work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (2022), reexamines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation of the environment.