The Museum of Modern Art presents „Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning“, the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, spanning more than 50 years of her remarkable career. On view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions, the exhibition features a selection of works produced from 1968 through the present, including videos, drawings, photographs, and major installations and performances—many of which have been revisited and reconfigured by the artist on the occasion of this exhibition. „Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning“ also presents extensive corresponding archival materials, an online video channel, and associated programs and screenings organized on the occasion of the exhibition.

„I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance“, Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, „Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning“ traces the full breadth of her career, from works that explore the encounter between performance and technology to recent installations about ecology and the landscape.

Jonas began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.
„Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning“ presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. „Despite my interest in history“, she has said, „my work always takes place in the present“.

Organized by Ana Janevski, Curator, with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Media and Performance. With thanks to Mitchell Herrmann, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, and Molly Superfine, Brandon Eng, and Piper Marshall, former Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellows, Department of Media and Performance.



Image: Joan Jonas: „Still from Double Lunar Dogs“, 1984, video (color, sound), 24 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2021 Joan Jonas. Image courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.