NEW YORK, NY.- Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is the first major retrospective focused on works on paper by Joan Jonas, one of the most significant experimental voices in American art of the postwar period. Although Jonas’s work has received critical attention and acclaim over the past few decades, her voluminous drawing oeuvre, which constitutes the backbone of her video, performance, and sculpture practices, has never been surveyed. This exhibition is a definitive look at the integral place of drawing in the career of this pioneering artist. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral occupies the entirety of The Drawing Center’s gallery spaces and features more than three hundred individual drawings dating from the 1960s to the present as well as a recent drawing environment that is being presented for the first time in the United States.

Chosen from more than 2,000 works on paper drawn by Jonas over a sixty-year period, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral examines the significance of the artist’s use of 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, butterflies, fish, snowflakes, 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.

Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is organized by Laura Hoptman, The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, with Rebecca DiGiovanna and working in close collaboration with Joan Jonas. “The idea for this exhibition came directly from the artist, who has lived in the SoHo neighborhood in close proximity to The Drawing Center for more than 60 years,” said Hoptman. “Our exhibition will emphasize not only the richness of her oeuvre of thousands of works on paper but also illuminate the ‘grand theme’ of all of her work: that of human interaction within the fragile beauty of the global ecosystem. It is enormously telling that the most basic delineation of components of the natural world—animal, vegetable and mineral—can describe almost every drawing that Jonas has ever made.”

Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral runs concurrently with a retrospective of Jonas’s work at MoMA, on view from March 17 through July 6, 2024.

Born in 1936 in New York, Joan Jonas is an acclaimed video and multimedia performance artist. She received a BA in Art History and Sculpture from Mount Holyoke College in 1958 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1965. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, her work merges elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts.

Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively around the world. Her notable exhibition history includes Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The Museum of Modern Art in New York will host a retrospective of her work from March 17 to July 6, 2024. Jonas is the recipient of many awards including The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon (2016); the Maya Deren Award given by the American Film Institute (1989); and the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, presented to those individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication devoted to Jonas’s drawing practice, co-published by The Drawing Center and DABA. Founded by the artist Adam Pendleton, DABA Press explores relationships between conceptual practices, Blackness, and the avant-garde, publishing artist’s books, books on art, and experimental writing.

The exhibition Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and its attending publication are made possible by the Every Page Foundation, Agnes Gund, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Shane Akeroyd, the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Director’s Circle of The Drawing Center.