Fall Mixed Media Series: Joan Jonas

World-renowned artist Joan Jonas—whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text and sculpture—will speak next month at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as a part of the college’s annual Mixed Media Series.

MICA’s Mixed Media Series brings notable art makers, designers and thinkers to campus to fuse our community with their insight and practices. The aim of this series is to build imaginative public events that showcase the diversity of practice in our fields and the complex relationship between creativity and the world around us.

Jonas will speak at 4pm Tuesday, November 5 in Falvey Hall, 1301 W. Mount Royal Ave. The event is free and open to the public. 

Joan Jonas’ experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Working between mediums and across genres—like biography, mythology and folklore—she has animated countless intellectual and artistic experiments in translation, technology and narrative. She is often said to be a pioneer, but her work is frequently a site of collaboration. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures. 

Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She studied at Mount Holyoke and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before returning to the city and receiving her MFA in sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. 

She is currently Professor Emerita in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Boston, and is the author of reference texts on the performing arts. Jonas is the recipient of fellowships and grants, and in 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, which is presented to those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. She lives and works in New York.    

About Maryland Institute College of Art
Founded in 1826, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. The College enrolls over 3,000 undergraduate, graduate and continuing studies students from 49 states and 65 countries in fine arts, design, electronic media, art education, liberal arts, and professional studies degree and non-credit programs. With art and design programs ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News and World Report, MICA is pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to innovation, research, and community and social engagement. Alumni and programming reach around the globe, even as MICA remains a cultural cornerstone in the Baltimore/Washington region, hosting hundreds of exhibitions and events annually by students, faculty and other established artists. To learn more, visit our new website.