Joan Jonas: An Island Departure, with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine presented between September 2025 and March 2026 a newly commissioned body of work by artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936) stemming from our artist commission The Island Project: Point of Departure. 

On September 30, 1971, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson purchased a tidal island off the coast of Maine sight unseen. Just few hundred feet long, accessible by foot at low tide, and with the creation of building structures forbidden, the island is at the mercy of the weather and the rising tides. Smithson developed some ideas for artworks on the island in drawings, but when the pair travelled to see the island in 1972 it was clear to them that leaving the island to simply be was enough. 

Five decades after the artists visited Maine, we invited five artists to think with the island in The Island Project: Point of Departure – Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, Joan Jonas, and Oscar Santillán. Islands are special places whose edges are never at rest. They are sites for the imagination and tangible locations with distinct biographies, that feel the changes of the world first.

At the Farnsworth, Jonas shared her response to the invitation. She was a close friend of both artists: they shared ideas, travelled together, and were part of a generational shift in the definition of art. Jonas has created an arrangement of rocks, sourced from local granite quarries, mapping out Little Fort Island. Drawings, communicating both the persona and agency of the island sit beside recently re-discovered experimental video footage from the early 1970s. It documents Holt, Smithson, the curator Joseph Helman, his family, and the artist Richard Serra discussing art and the market, and Jonas filmed it at Helman's home in St Louis.

The exhibition included works by Holt and Smithson that focus on the island, alongside video and photography where Joan Jonas features: two photoworks by Holt made in 1968, and the 1969 video East Coast/West Coast.  

Joan Jonas: An Island Departure was organized in partnership with the Farnsworth and Holt/Smithson Foundation, co-curated by Farnsworth Chief Curator Jaime DeSimone and Lisa Le Feuvre, our Executive Director.