A Night With School of the Arts Alumna Joan Jonas

On the recent evening when legendary artist Joan Jonas (SoA’65) came to the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the weather was a wintry mix: Snow had turned to ice in the streets. Rain became hail, became sleet, became snow, and then back to rain. This was good luck for the event. More people had booked tickets than there were available seats. Students, alumni, and Manhattanites alike braved the weather to see Jonas, who the Museum of Modern Art credits with being crucial to the formation of both video and performance art. When her 5-foot frame took the stage in the Lantern, on the top floor of Lenfest, every orange chair in the room was taken.

Jonas developed as an artist amid the revolutionary downtown New York scene in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside the new technology of portable film recorders. Her landmark art films like Wind (1968) and Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1973) incorporate mirrors, elements of improvisation, and ritualistic settings—a frozen Long Island beach and a studio in SoHo, among objects curated and strange.

These motifs have followed Jonas through decades of continual evolution as an artist, whose work encompasses a wide range of media, including—in addition to video and performance—installation, sound, text, sculpture, and drawing. Among her many notable achievements are winning the Kyoto Prize in 2018 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, as well as exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

The School of the Arts talk was not billed as a retrospective. MoMA mounted one in 2024, devoted to Jonas’s entire career, for which she also delivered a slate of new work. Her artistic output is regenerative, improvised, forward-looking. The Lenfest event instead marked a beginning—the first of Speak Now, a series featuring eminent graduates to celebrate the School of the Arts’ 60th year. Jonas is such an early and influential graduate of the School of the Arts that her legacy has helped define the school itself.

After School of the Arts Dean Sarah Cole provided introductory remarks, Jonas and Adama Delphine Fawundu, an assistant professor in SoA’s Visual Arts program, engaged Jonas in a conversation.

Waltz

“I made many pieces, and many of them are long,” Jonas said. Her tone was conversational, both reserved and intimate—like a celebrity, which she is. “I want to show you one that’s six minutes long, so you can see how I deal with form.” A screen came down behind her.

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a song, film, or dance,” she said as the house lights dimmed. “A gesture has the same weight for me as a drawing. Draw, erase, draw, erase, draw, erase.” In the darkness of the room, her film Waltz (2003) played.

Waltz is a mosaic of videos that takes place in the woods on the coast of Nova Scotia, where Jonas summers. At its climax, a mirror, suspended in blue air, reflects a tree. The mirror tilts and hits the sun, blinding the audience. In the flash, Jonas disappears. Her white dog, left alone, barks. Jonas reappears wearing a mantle of petals. Her dog howls, and she joins in. Jonas exits the screen. She comes back, just to disappear again.

Mirrors

Jonas began her mirror performances in 1970. “My first prop and my most important prop for all its qualities,” she said, of the mirror. A photograph appeared on the screen. It showed the legs of a young woman, Jonas’s legs, lying on grass. A mirror cuts her body off below the hips. Instead of a torso, her legs keep going.

Jonas took the mirror into video with Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy in 1973. She performs as an “erotic electronic seductress” (her words), incorporating live footage. Sony had released the Portapak, a handheld video camera, in 1967. Jonas soon traveled to Japan to pick one up. Organic Honey was the first film of its kind.

“For me, the video was an ongoing mirror,” she said. “Everything became a reflection and an extension of the body. An ongoing world of reflection. The way it makes the audience respond and feel. Perception or misperception. I have always enjoyed that loading up of situations to make a complex statement.”

Collaboration

Jonas seeks collaboration wherever she goes. Fawundu’s line of questions and observations invited such collaboration: “Your reuse and accumulation of materials in your work speaks to transformation across time and space,” she said. “I’m curious as to how your works continue to grow and transform.”

“In 1973 I did a video of women swimming in a pool, either naked or with white dresses underwater,” Jonas said. “I used that image in Reanimation many years later to show that everything is going to be underwater.” Reanimation is the name of a series of works from the 2010s that caught the attention of the Kyoto Prize commission. “And, of course, nobody could remember the other video from 1973.”

Wind is Fawundu’s favorite work of Jonas’s. She has watched it several times. Collaboration, both practiced and improvised, is essential to Wind. “The way I’d work with [a performer] is, I’d demonstrate the movement I wanted her to do, and then she’d do it in her way,” said Jonas. “With Wind, we tried to perform the same thing outdoors as indoors, but the wind affected us. I couldn’t get the mirrors off after filming. It was freezing. I had to rip the mirror costume off. The wind was the collaborator, the unexpected guest.”

Respect for nature is essential to Jonas’s ethos. In her installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, she included footage of a beekeeper and performances by children of her friends. She wanted to include children, she said, because they are the ones who will be left with the environment.

In response to Fawundu’s appreciation for Wind, Jonas said, “You don’t know how it’s going to turn out because the wind is going to do what it’s going to do. We are in this state with the climate. Nature is going to do what it’s going to do. We need to learn how to work with it rather than try to control it.”

Innovation

The closing portion of the evening was a Q&A session. Ushers walked through the aisles to collect questions written on note cards. “What has been your key to maintaining a long and relevant career in the art world? How do you balance innovation with staying true to your artistic voice?” Fawundu asked on behalf of an audience member.

“I didn’t get famous at the beginning at all,” Jonas said. “But I was in an art community. My audience was artists. I studied art history. I go to museums all the time. You can never stop learning about art. When I studied art, I was curious about, how does art begin?” 

The search sent her to the Mediterranean, to learn about the Minoans and Mycenaeans. “What kept me going,” she said, “was a love of art. It’s a dialogue we have. We don’t feel unequal or older or younger. We can talk to each other. That’s inspiring.”

When Jonas started as an artist, the field was limited to a few cities—chiefly, New York and Paris. Now, she said, it can happen anywhere, as long as you have friends to show your art to. “I learned that the world is a beautiful place despite the many problems. It’s so important to communicate that. It’s what we have. That’s what we’re saying to each other now. Work with what you have. Do not let the world intrude upon you. It’s very important to be aware, but to always have that center to be in with your friends.”

Ellice Lueders will receive her MFA in Writing from School of the Arts in 2026.