CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center announces that the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has pledged a lead foundation gift of $200,000 in support of pioneering video and performance artist Joan Jonas’s presentation for the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. This major commitment makes a significant impact on the List’s ongoing fundraising campaign for the project, which has raised $1.5 million to date.
The List, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, will present Joan Jonas as the representative for the United States at La Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition, on view May 9 – November 22, 2015. Jonas, a seminal figure in performance art and video, will create a new multimedia installation that will transform the entirety of the Pavilion’s five galleries into a dynamically immersive environment.
Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, said, “The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is honored to provide support for Joan Jonas’s project for this year’s Venice Biennale. It is a particularly meaningful gift for us, because in 1966 Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), along with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jules Olitski, represented the U.S. at the 33rd Venice Biennale. It seems fitting that, 49 years later, the Foundation is able to support another pioneering artist at this major moment in her long and distinguished career.”
Paul Ha, Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and commissioner and co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, stated, “On behalf of the List, Joan Jonas, and everyone involved in this project, I extend our great appreciation to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation for its incredible generosity and support. We’re very excited to present Joan Jonas’s latest work in Venice this May, and the Foundation’s gift will play an important role in bringing her vision for the U.S. Pavilion to life.”
For the five galleries of the U.S. Pavilion, Joan Jonas will conceive a new complex of works, creating a multilayered ambience incorporating video, drawings, objects, and sound. Literature has always been an inspiration and source for Jonas, and the project for Venice will extend her investigation into the work of Halldór Laxness and his writing on the spiritual aspects of nature, but will focus on other literary sources.
Jonas has continued to work with a multimedia approach throughout her career, being one of the first artists to explore the potential of the video camera as a tool for image-making and the TV monitor as a sculptural object. At the same time, she experimented in her performances with incorporating the body into the visual field. Her installations and performances bring these components together through drawing, props, and objects to create works reflecting her research in relation to space, narrative, or storytelling, and materials as they are altered through various technologies such as the mirror, video, and distance. In Venice, she will work with these diverse aspects of her practice to create five distinct rooms, with common themes unifying and resonating in the entire space, relating to the present condition of the world in poetic terms.
Jonas's work developed out of her art-history studies and sculptural practice, and expanded to performance and film in the 1960s through her involvement with the New York avant-garde scene. Her work has had a significant influence on contemporary art to date, as she has continued to be a major figure in the fields of performance and video art throughout the past five decades.
