The exhibition Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and its attending publication are made possible by the Every Page Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Director’s Circle of The Drawing Center.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral will be the first major drawing retrospective of Joan Jonas, one of the most experimental and significant voices in American art of the postwar period. Although Jonas’s work has received critical attention and acclaim over the past few decades, her voluminous drawing oeuvre, which constitutes the backbone of her video, performance, and sculpture practices, has never been surveyed. This exhibition will be a definitive look at the integral place of drawing in the career of this pioneering feminist artist. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral will occupy the entirety of The Drawing Center's gallery spaces and will feature more than three hundred individual drawings dating from the 1960s to the present as well as a recent drawing environment that will be presented in the United States for the first time.
Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is organized by Laura Hoptman, The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, working in close collaboration with the SoHo-based artist. It will run concurrently with a retrospective of Jonas’s work at MoMA, on view from March 17 through July 6, 2024.