Joan Jonas: An Island Departure, with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson is the second in our series of five projects dedicated to Little Fort Island in Maine. We are very happy to be partnering with the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, to presenta newly commissioned body of work by artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936).

This collaboration has stemmed from an invitation to respond to a unique episode in land art history. 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 creating of building structures forbidden, the island is at the mercy of the weather and the rising tides. Smithson had already developed some ideas for artworks in drawings, but when the pair travelled to see the island in 1972 from their home in New York City it was clear them that leaving the island to simply be was enough. 

Both Holt and Smithson were committed to examining the ways the surface of our planet has been shaped first by geological history and then by human history. Five decades after the artists visited Maine, we at the Foundation  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.

This conceptual and material island provocation is an ongoing inquiry into themes of ownership, transience, and collaboration. At the Farnsworth, Jonas shares 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. The exhibition includes works by Holt and Smithson: some were made during their visit to Maine, others are artwork ideas for the island,  and Jonas can be seen two photoworks by Holt made in 1968 and in the 1969 video East Coast/West Coast.  

For An Island Departure at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Jonas has created an arrangement of rocks, sourced from local granite quarries, mapping out Little Fort Island. They are surrounded by a horizon of drawings, communicating both the persona and agency of the island. Also on show is some recently re-discovered experimental video footage from the early 1970s of Jonas, Holt, Smithson, the curator Joseph Helman and his family, and the artist Richard Serra discussing art and the market at Helman's home in St Louis.

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