In the spirit of Joan Jonas’s long-time collaborative engagement with music, dance, and literature, this evening gathering, presented in conjunction with the exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, will celebrate new questions and new creative responses to the artist’s practice. The evening’s title is taken from Jonas’s poem “Broken Symmetry,” written in November 2010 as a performance exercise for her students at MIT, where she instructed readers to “ask a friend to give you a sentence.” This text was later used in a performance with Jason Moran and the Bandwagon in 2012; Moran, a frequent collaborator of Jonas’s, commented that this methodology of exchange is precisely how jazz works.
This in-person event is completely full. Please register for the Zoom webinar or email [email protected] to be added to the waitlist.
This evening will consist of short creative offerings generated in response to a sentence provided by Joan Jonas. We’ll begin with an introduction by Jonas, followed by contributions from musician David Michael DiGregorio, scientist David Gruber, poet Susan Howe, poet Precious Okoyomon, performance artist Ralph Lemon, and scholar André Lepecki.
Presenters
David Michael DiGregorio is a composer and musician. His background includes classical and improvised piano techniques, diverse vocal methods, performance with a gospel choir, electro-acoustic composition, synthesis, and experimental pop construction. His discography includes the albums In Korean Wilds and Villages (as dogr), one from in the room, and howl bowel owl. He has performed in major concerts at venues including Barakat Gallery, Seoul; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; New Museum, New York; and STEIM, Amsterdam, and in group concerts at MoMA PS1 and Danspace Project, New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle for Music, Witte de With, Rotterdam; Brilliant Collaborators, Ilmin Museum, Seoul; and New Habits, CASCO, Utrecht. His film Cover screened in the 2022 collection exhibition at Nam June Paik Art Center, Korea. DiGregorio has collaborated since 2006 with Sung Hwan Kim. He also has collaborated with Jewyo Rhii, Haegue Yang, Otobong Nkanga, Rosa Barba, Byungjun Kwon, Martín Lanz Landázuri, Danai Anesiadou.
Susan Howe’s poetry collection That This won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. In 2017 she received the Robert Frost Award for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. She has made five albums in collaboration with the musician and composer David Grubbs: Thiefth (2005), Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007), Frolic Architecture (2011), Woodslippercounterclatter (2015), and Concordance (2021). Over the last decade, The Quarry (2015), a book of selected essays, and Debths (2017), a new collection of poems, were published; the latter won the Griffith Award for Poetry in Canada in 2018. Concordance, her most recent collection of poems was published in 2020.
Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and director of the Swiss Institute (SI) in New York. At SI, she has co-curated exhibitions by Raven Chacon, Ali Cherri, and Lap-See Lam, as well as the Spora initiative, which invites artists to transform the institution through what she calls “environmental institutional critique.” Previously, as the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, Hessler co-led the critically acclaimed, research-based exhibition Sex Ecologies and edited the accompanying compendium on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds (2021). Hessler is the author of Prospecting Ocean (2019), and has edited numerous volumes. In 2019, Hessler curated the exhibition Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II at Ocean Space, Venice.
Born in 1936 in New York City, Joan Jonas is one of the most important US artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is a pathbreaking figure in video and performance art; her early projects and experiments were influential in the establishment of video performance art and video installation as artistic mediums, and her influence has extended to Conceptual art, theater, and beyond. Teaching has also been a central part of her career, and she has worked with new generations of artists at institutions including Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart; Rijksakademie van Deeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; and, since 1998, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where she is now professor emerita. She has performed and exhibited internationally, with retrospectives at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022), Fundação de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto (2019), Tate Modern, London (2018), HangarBicocca, Milan (2014), Queens Museum of Art (2003), Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart (2000), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994), and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1994), among many other solo and group exhibitions. She represented the US at the Biennale di Venezia 56th International Art Exhibition in 2015, and in 2018 she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Art. Jonas lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia.
Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer, and visual artist whose work has been presented at venues across the United States and internationally. His book Come Home Charley Patton (2013) marked the culmination of his The Geography Trilogy, a multi-decade, multidisciplinary performance examining the social gravities of art, race, and identity at the turn of the 21st century. The first monograph of his work was published by The Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Dance Series in 2016. Lemon received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award and a 2020 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2022 he won the Bucksbaum Award for his work in that year’s Whitney Biennial.
André Lepecki is an essayist, dramaturge, and independent curator based in New York City. He is a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and is associate dean of the Center for Research and Study at Tisch School of the Arts. As dramaturge he has worked with Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, Francisco Camacho, and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods. He has curated festivals and projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, and Sydney Biennial 2016, among others. He is editor of several anthologies on performance and dance theory, and the author of Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006, published in 14 languages) and Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016). He was the recipient of the 2008 Best Performance award from AICA (USA Section) for co-curating and directing an authorized reworking of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Since 2003 he has collaborated on several actions with performance artist Eleonora Fabião.
Precious Okoyomon is a London-born, New York City–based Nigerian American artist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice investigates the racialization of the natural world, intimacy, and ideas and experiences of life, death, and time. They have had solo exhibitions at the Luma Westbau in Zurich (2018), the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2020), Performance Space New York (2021), and, most recently, at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome (2023). Their second book, But Did U Die? (2024), explores the complexities of their identity as a Black, queer immigrant. Their work will be included in Nigeria Imaginary, a group exhibition representing the Nigerian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Accessibility
This theater is equipped with an induction loop that transmits directly to hearing aids with T-coils.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these accommodations.
The nearest all-gender restroom is located on T1.
Wheelchair accessible seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information on accessibility at MoMA please visit moma.org/Visit/Accessibility.