Ask your friend to give you a sentence: Joan Jonas and Friends
About this Event
Joan Jonas has been at the vanguard of installation, video, and performance, and has worked across multiple mediums since the 1960s. Alongside her artistic practice, teaching has remained a constant and essential part of her work over the years. Mentoring generations of young artists, she has approached pedagogy as a deeply personal tool for challenging imagination and critical thinking. In her words, “My only method in teaching is to share my own process.”
Inspired by her unique approach to teaching, and continuing our interest in public programming that keeps the School and open arts pedagogies in active dialogue, we bring her workshop methods to the first event of Fall 2026 at Skowhegan NYC. “Ask your friend to give you a sentence” is a phrase from her poem Broken Symmetry, which she converted into a performance exercise for students at MIT in 2010 with that line used as an instruction. This method for artistic exchange is also an apt description for her translation of an idea from one form into another. Joan brought this approach to her courses through Broken Symmetry alongside various workshop exercises, asking students to consider how text might shift into performance or how a live performance might then iterate into a video artwork of its own.
For this evening, we invite artists, writers, improvisers, and musicians to respond to one of Joan’s favorite course readings, the poem a list of the delusions of the insane: what they are afraid of (1968) by poet and art critic David Antin, using her workshop method. The resulting variety show is a celebration of her teaching, work, and lifelong commitment to making art with others—a prompt to think about different methodologies of learning as an exercise of transformative exchange.
Presenters to be announced.
This event is free and open to all. To stay up-to-date with Skowhegan's public programs, .
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About the artist:
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, sculpture, and drawing. 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 theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Photo: Joan Jonas, Reading Dante, performance at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain, 2007. Photo by Jaunchi Pegoraro.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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