Hirshhorn and The Gund Jointly Acquire Two Landmark Joan Jonas Works

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and The Gund at Kenyon College have jointly acquired two foundational works by Joan Jonas, bringing the pioneering artist into both collections for the first time. Announced on August 26, the partnership adds Wind from 1968 and Mirror Pieces Installation II, originally conceived in 1969 and reworked in 2014, to two institutions with different but complementary audiences.

The acquisition is significant because the works sit near the beginning of Jonas’s long investigation into performance, film, video, mirrors and the instability of perception. Rather than treating a live action, a recorded image and a sculptural object as separate categories, Jonas made them operate together. The viewer is not positioned outside the work; reflection, movement and shifting points of view pull the audience into the visual field.

Wind is a five-and-a-half-minute black-and-white film made on a snowy Long Island beach. A group of performers attempts a sequence of actions while strong wind disrupts their balance, clothing and choreography. Two figures wear garments decorated with mirrors, allowing flashes of the surrounding landscape to move across their bodies. The weather is not simply a backdrop. It becomes an active force that changes the performance.

Mirror Pieces Installation II is more expansive. A mirrored dress and jacket hang near three long mirrors, while footage of Jonas’s 1969 performance Nudes with Mirrors plays on a cathode-ray television directed toward the reflective surfaces. Visitors encounter the recording indirectly and see their own bodies enter the image. The arrangement makes observation unstable: the person looking is also visible, fragmented and folded into the work.

Jonas reworked the installation in 2014, demonstrating that performance art can have an evolving material life rather than a single fixed date. Costumes, props, film and display equipment preserve traces of an earlier event, but each installation produces a new encounter. That ability to move between archive and present experience is one reason her work has remained central to discussions of video, performance and feminist art.

The co-acquisition addresses a gap in the Hirshhorn’s new-media collection. Museum director Melissa Chiu said women who were essential to the early development of performance art remain underrepresented in those holdings. Adding Jonas provides a stronger account of how artists expanded sculpture and moving-image practice in the late 1960s, when portable cameras and experimental performance were changing what an artwork could be.

For The Gund, a teaching museum at Kenyon College in Ohio, shared ownership creates access that would be difficult to secure alone. Mirror Pieces Installation II is already on view there as part of the museum’s fifteenth-anniversary program. The agreement allows the institutions to divide stewardship, research and public presentation while giving students and visitors outside a major coastal art center sustained contact with historically important work.

The two museums will mark the acquisition with a free public conversation at the Hirshhorn on September 10 featuring Jonas, Hirshhorn acting head curator Marina Isgro and curator Daisy Desrosiers. That program makes the artist’s own account part of the acquisition story. It also offers a chance to discuss how museums conserve performance works whose meaning depends on bodies, technology, choreography and changing installation conditions.

Jonas, born in New York in 1936, has exhibited internationally for decades. Her recent institutional recognition includes a major Museum of Modern Art retrospective, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale and exhibitions at Tate Modern, Dia Beacon and other museums. Those surveys have reinforced a point long understood by artists and scholars: her experiments helped establish the vocabulary of contemporary video and performance.

Joint acquisitions are also a practical model for museums facing rising costs and growing expectations for access. Shared ownership requires careful coordination, but it can extend the public life of a work across different regions and scholarly communities. In this case, the arrangement mirrors Jonas’s own interest in unstable viewpoints. Wind and Mirror Pieces Installation II will not belong to one fixed setting; their meaning will continue to develop as they move between institutions and audiences.