During an opening-day talk for The Body Electric, which includes her 1974 installation Funnel, video and performance art pioneer Joan Jonas looks back across her decades-long practice with exhibition curator Pavel Pyś.
Born in 1936, Jonas works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational works that are equally at home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present. She received a BA from Mount Holyoke College (1958), attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1958–1961), and earned an MFA from Columbia University (1965). She is a professor emerita at MIT.
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