Joan Jonas '58: 60 Years Later

Incorporating video, sculpture, drawing, and performance, Joan Jonas’s innovative work uses diverse storytelling traditions to explore ways of seeing. As the 2018-2019 Leading Woman in the Arts, Jonas is the first alumna in the program’s 12-year history.

Born in New York in 1936, Jonas received her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College before attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Columbia University, where she earned an M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1965. She has participated in Germany’s prestigious dOCUMENTA six times since 1972, and in 2015, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Currently, Jonas is the subject of a major touring retrospective, organized by Tate Modern, London and in June 2018, she was selected as a recipient of the prestigious Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy. A hero and mentor to a younger generation of artists, she is professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jonas lives and works in New York City and Nova Scotia.

This lecture is by made possible by the Weissman Center for Leadership and the InterArts Council.