Born in New York in 1936, Joan Jonas is a pioneering figure in video and performance art. Though she originally trained as a sculptor, her multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, installation, and live performance. Jonas emerged during the fertile artistic climate of the 1960s and 1970s in downtown New York, where she worked in close dialogue with a vibrant community of artists, dancers, choreographers, and musicians including Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and John Cage.

In this context of experimentation and cross-disciplinary exchange, Jonas developed a singular performance language that incorporated movement, props, costumes, sound, and scripted action. Her work often blurs the lines between mediums and identities, layering personal mythology with universal gesture.

The works on view include selections from Jonas’s ongoing Body Drawings, created over the past two decades as part of various performances. These large-scale works are made on Japanese paper, a material Jonas first encountered during her travels in the 1970s. Each drawing is a record of performative movement, a physical trace of the artist’s gestures made in real time. Neither pure abstraction nor figurative depiction, these compositions collapse the act of representation and the act of registration into a single embodied moment. Through them, Jonas extends her exploration of the body as a site of memory, rhythm, and transformation.