About this Event
Joan Jonas has been at the vanguard of installation, video, and performance, and has worked across multiple mediums since the 1960s. Alongside her artistic practice, teaching has remained a constant and essential part of her work over the years. Mentoring generations of young artists, she has approached pedagogy as a deeply personal tool for challenging imagination and critical thinking. In her words, “My only method in teaching is to share my own process.”
Inspired by her unique approach to teaching, and continuing our interest in public programming that keeps the School and open arts pedagogies in active dialogue, we bring her workshop methods to the first event of Fall 2026 at Skowhegan NYC. “Ask your friend to give you a sentence” is a phrase from her poem Broken Symmetry, which she converted into a performance exercise for students at MIT in 2010 with that line used as an instruction. This method for artistic exchange is also an apt description for her translation of an idea from one form into another. Joan brought this approach to her courses through Broken Symmetry alongside various workshop exercises, asking students to consider how text might shift into performance or how a live performance might then iterate into a video artwork of its own.
For this evening, we invite artists, writers, improvisers, and musicians to respond to one of Joan’s course readings using her workshop method. The resulting variety show is a celebration of her teaching, work, and lifelong commitment to making art with others—a prompt to think about different methodologies of learning as an exercise of transformative exchange.
This event is free and open to all. To stay up-to-date with Skowhegan's public programs, .
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About the artists:
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY) is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, sculpture, and drawing. Jonas’ experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Lydia Cornett is a filmmaker, composer and artist. Her work explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression across nonfiction and experimental forms. Her work has shown at the Venice International Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Camden Film Festival, The Barbican Centre, and Liget Gallery. She has held residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Fulbright Hungary, BRICLab, the Jacob Burns Film Center, and UnionDocs.
David Michael DiGregorio (b. 1979) is a composer working in a materially diverse, spatial manner, with singing central to his practice. His music draws on classical and improvised piano techniques, electro-acoustic synthesis, and musique concrète. His ongoing song cycle Read Aloud Lyrics has been presented at Bard College, Van Abbemuseum, and Barakat Contemporary. His longstanding collaboration with Sung Hwan Kim (A01, F19) has produced music, performance, film, and installation works presented internationally, including at MoMA, Tate Modern, the Hawaiʻi Triennial. Solo concerts include HyundaiCard Music Library, Pirelli HangarBicocca, the New Museum. He has also worked as Actualina since 2020.
Prem Krishnamurthy curates experimental experiences, exhibitions, and gatherings so that people can connect with something larger than themselves. He received the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With” fellowship in 2018. In 2019, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies acquired his professional papers. His books include P!DF (2017–2020), On Letters (2022), and Past Words (2024), an anthology of his writing and curatorial projects. In 2022, he founded Department of Transformation, an artist-organized group that prototypes new methods for togetherness, learning, and collective healing.
Sidian Liu (b. 1997, Foshan, China) is an artist, translator, yarner, and nest builder based in Brooklyn, New York. Using skills she learned from reproductive labor and domestic work, she makes social relationships to facilitate trust and intimacy from a respectful distance, exploring pathways to a care-ful society. Her works often facilitate encounters across differences by performing a service, cherishing traces from social exchanges, redistributing agency and perspective, and addressing the tension between polarized ideologies. Living in flux, she creates works that take responsive forms in images, performance, light-weight installations, and socially-engaged projects.
Valerie Smith is an art historian, curator, and writer living and working in New York. As the director of the curatorial departments at Artists Space, the Queens Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and commissioner of Sonsbeek 93, Arnhem, NL she curated exhibitions with artists and architects such as, Mike Kelley, Annette Messager, Juan Muñoz, Alighiero e Boetti, Nari Ward, Emily Jacir, Shirin Neshat, Joan Jonas, Amateur Architecture Studio (Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu), Klara Lidén, Jimmie Durham, Qiu Zhijie, Paweł Althamer, Elizabeth Diller/Ricardo Scofidio, Juan Downey. She edited and interviewed for 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years (1998) and wrote the monograph, Amy Sillman (2019) as well as numerous catalogue essays. She currently teaches at Barnard College, Columbia University, is writing a book on 19th century American drawings, and curating an exhibition with Jonas in Split.
Charmaine Warren, with Davalois Fearon
Photo: Joan Jonas, Reading Dante, performance at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain, 2007. Photo by Jaunchi Pegoraro.
Event venue & nearby stays
Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture - New York Office, 136 West 22nd Street, New York, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.