Lavine Lecture: Joan Jonas: A Meter-Making Argument / A Talk by Gregory Volk

Join us in continuing the celebration of Joan Jonas in the lead-up to the 2015 Venice Bienale through this special Lavine Lecture with art critic and curator Gregory Volk.

Joan Jonas, a brilliant practitioner and pioneer of video, performance, and installation art, is among the most significant artists of the past several decades.  Since the late 1960s she has exhibited and performed throughout the world, and in 2015 she will represent the U.S. with a major exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale organized by the List.  As a professor of visual art and now professor emerita at M.I.T., Jonas has a long relationship with Cambridge and Boston. In this lecture, art critic and curator Gregory Volk explores Jonas’s work through the years, while also positing a novel connection between Jonas and a visionary strain in American art, literature, and thought leading back to the Boston area and Transcendentalist poet/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Gregory Volk is a New York-based art critic and freelance curator. He writes regularly for Art in America, and his articles and reviews have also appeared in many other publications, including Parkett and Sculpture. Among his contributions to exhibition catalogues are essays on Bruce Nauman (Milwaukee Art Museum, 2006), Joan Jonas (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2007), Ayse Erkmen (Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2011), and Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (Tang Teaching Museum/Reykjavik Art Museum, 2014). His essay on Vito Acconci is featured in Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973, published by Charta in 2007. Gregory Volk has curated numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including Three Parts Whole at i8 Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland (2011) and Elemental at Havremagasinet in Boden, Sweden (2013), an exhibition that featured select Icelandic artists and prominent international artists who are deeply engaged with Iceland, including Joan Jonas. Gregory Volk received his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.A. from Columbia University.  He is also associate professor in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2015, together with Michelle Grabner (artist, curator, and one of the three curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial), Gregory Volk will be a visiting critic and lecturer in the Viewpoints series at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lecture Series was established to honor the Lavines, two prominent Boston art patrons and long time supporters of the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The Leroy and Dorothy Lavine Lectures bring to the Boston community distinguished art world figures for talks on modern and contemporary art.