Image: Joan Jonas. Image via Art21 (art21.org)
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and The Gund at Kenyon College have acquired two works by Joan Jonas, marking the first time that works by the artist have entered either collection. The institutions will mark the acquisition with ‘Artist Talk: Joan Jonas’ — billed in the museum’s newsletter as ‘Joan Jonas in Conversation’ — a free discussion at the Hirshhorn on September 10, 2026, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
The newly acquired works are the multimedia installation ‘Mirror Pieces Installation II’ (1969/2014) and the film ‘Wind’ (1968). The museum’s newsletter dates the installation 1964/2014 and gives the film’s title as ‘The Wind’; the dates and title used here follow the Hirshhorn’s own event page. The Hirshhorn’s announcement describes the pair as landmark works by Jonas, whose practice has encompassed performance, video, installation, sculpture and drawing. The September conversation will celebrate their arrival in the two collections, although the supplied announcement does not specify a public display schedule for either work.
Jonas will be joined in conversation by Marina Isgro, the Hirshhorn’s curator of media and performance art and currently its interim head curator, and Daisy Desrosiers, curatorial and strategic lead at The Gund and Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North America, at Tate.
Jonas was born in New York in 1936 and is identified by Art21 as a pioneer of performance and video art. Her work frequently brings together video, installation, sculpture and drawing, often in collaboration with musicians and dancers. Art21 describes her projects as improvisational works that move between the museum gallery and the theatrical stage, drawing on mythic stories from different cultures while addressing the politics of the present.
Mirrors, reflection and doubled identities are recurring elements in Jonas’s practice. According to Art21, she uses masks, drawing and camera-based performance to disrupt conventional theatrical storytelling, while turning mirrors toward audiences as metaphors for the unstable boundary between subjective and objective vision. That context is especially relevant to ‘Mirror Pieces Installation II,’ which the Hirshhorn’s event page dates 1969/2014.
Jonas studied at Mount Holyoke College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Columbia University, where she received an MFA in 1965. She is a professor emerita at MIT. Her exhibition history includes presentations at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Dia:Beacon, the Venice Biennale, Documenta and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, among other institutions. Art21 also lists awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for Video.
The talk will be held at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, at Independence Avenue and 7th Street SW in Washington. The event is free. Advance tickets for Hirshhorn Insider members and Kenyon alumni are released on Friday, August 21 at 7 p.m., and general tickets on Monday, August 24 at 7 p.m.; capacity is limited. Jonas lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
