GAMBIER, OH.- In a milestone collaboration between two American centers of modern and contemporary art scholarship, The Gund at Kenyon College and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announce the joint acquisition of two watershed artworks by Joan Jonas: “Mirror Pieces Installation II” (1969/2014) and “Wind” (1968). These are the first works by the pioneering American artist to enter both collections.
Widely recognized as one of the founding figures of American performance art, Jonas began bridging film and video, installation and sculpture, and body art in the mid-1960s, often experimenting with movement, mirrors and natural forces to forward her inquiry into perception. “Mirror Pieces Installation II” is a multimedia installation that incorporates the viewer through the inclusion of multiple mirrors. A dress and a jacket decorated with mirrored panels hang on a wall near three long mirrors, while a filmed performance—Jonas’s “Nudes with Mirrors” (1969)—plays on a CRT television turned to face the mirrors. It features a group of performers interacting with props resembling those in the installation. One performer, a man, alternately dons and removes a mirrored jacket while observing his image in mirrors held by the other performers. Viewers encountering this artwork enter a similar visual dance: as they observe the recording indirectly through its mirror image, their own bodies are reflected and absorbed into the ever-changing artwork, raising questions of reality, self-perception and the female gaze. As is typical of her practice, Jonas reworked this piece in 2014. The work is currently on view at The Gund as part of its 15th anniversary celebrations.
One of Jonas’s best-known works, “Wind” is a five-and-a-half-minute black and white film in which a group of performers on a snowy Long Island beach conducts a series of actions against a strong wind. One performer wears a dress and another a jacket, both ornamented with mirrors that reflect the icy environment. As in “Mirror Pieces Installation II,” the artist blurs the lines between figure and landscape, reality and fiction.
“Joan Jonas’s work continues to challenge how we think about performance, image, narrative, and the role of the artist as a witness to the world,” said Daisy Desrosiers, former David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation Director and Chief Curator for The Gund, and new named Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North America, at Tate Modern “For an emerging academic museum like The Gund, welcoming these works is both an extraordinary privilege and a defining moment. It reflects our conviction that students and communities deserve direct access to the artists who have shaped the course of art history—not only through exhibitions, but also through enduring commitments to their work. This co-acquisition with the Hirshhorn demonstrates that collaboration is not simply a practical model for museums today; it is an intellectual one. By sharing stewardship, expertise and public engagement, museums can expand access, strengthen scholarship and collectively build collections that no single institution could realize alone.” In June, Desrosiers began her role at the Tate, but remains the curatorial and strategic lead for The Gund.
“The acquisitions build on the Hirshhorn’s new media holdings, which include significant artworks but underrepresent women such as Joan Jonas who were vital to performance art’s early development,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “We are honored to partner with The Gund to illuminate her centrality within the evolution of new media and performance art while also encouraging study and public presentation of her work.”
Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She received her BA in art history and sculpture from Mount Holyoke College, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively at venues around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the US Pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de So Paulo; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Drawing Center, New York. In addition, she has exhibited in documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th So Paulo Biennial; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. Notable awards include the Nam June Paik Prize (2024), the Kyoto Prize (2018), 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).
