Joan Jonas | Good Night/Good Morning at MoMa

I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning traces the full breadth of her career, from works that explore the encounter between performance and technology to recent installations
about ecology and the landscape.

Jonas began her career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.

This new exhibition presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.”

Starting April 25,  a Carte Blanche program features films that Jonas selected from MoMA’s collection, presented alongside a number of her own rarely screened video works. Taken together, they make vividly evident that, from the earliest days of her experimentation with the new medium of video, Jonas has absorbed and translated the conventions of cinema into her own polyvalent practice.

Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53^rd Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Joan Jonas | Animal Vegetable Mineral at Drawing Center

Concurrent with the full-on retrospective at MoMA, this retrospective of works on paper by Joan Jonas offers a denitive look at the integral place of drawing in the career of this pioneering artist. One  of the most signicant experimental voices in American art over the past five decades, Jonas used the medium of drawing as a recording device, an expression of the notion of process, and a way to bring imagery of the natural world into her performances and environments. 

Jonas’s drawings depict dogs and other mammals like horses and foxes, as well as birds, butteries, sh, snowakes, shells, rocks, leaves, and even rivulets of water. Over the years, the artist has also drawn herself, isolating individual body parts like her hands, face, and torso, creating atomized self-portraits that are as studied and carefully rendered as her lexicons of non-human animals. This voluminous drawing oeuvre, which constitutes the backbone of her video, performance, and sculpture practices, has never been surveyed.

Save the date: April 11 at 6:30pm: Joan Jonas in conversation with artist Adam Pendleton. Info

The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY Info 

Sunday, March 31: Last Chance to see Women Celebrate Women 

Co-curated by New York-based mixed media artist Yvonne Lamar-Rogers and PS109 Programs Director Rolinda Ramos, the exhibition includes works by 60+ local female artists working in all disciplines to celebrate and honor Women’s History Month.”  Right: Art by co-curator Yvonne amar Rogers, detail from a meixed media piece

The public is invited to view the works at the beautiful El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, a previously abandoned public school building that was transformed into a community housing complex for artists. The circa-1899 landmark building offers beautiful space for the arts as well as important cultural programming in the East Harlem community. 
For more information about Women Celebrate Women and El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 programs, please go to Instagram @elbarriosartspace and @women_celebrate_women

Through March 31^st El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, 215 East 99^th Street, New York, NY  

9 West 57 9 Update

I’m delighted to report some good news about the 5.4 ton big red, but currently green, 9 that marks the entrance 9 West 57^th Street. In response to the DART Diary of March 21, Tom Geismar wrote, "As to the big red 9, my strong guess is that you need not be concerned. This is not the first time that they have painted it in a different color to mark a season or an event, or to do repairs. Every time it happens, we get very distressed calls and emails from family and others. But, at least over the past years, they always eventually restore it to the original shiny red finish. My hunch is that the green color is just a Spring holiday gesture."

So thanks again, Tom, for your re-assuring words!