Joan Jonas: An Island Departure at the Farnsworth Art Museum
Joan Jonas: An Island Departure, with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson is on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, through March 1, 2026. This collaboration with the Farnsworth presents a newly commissioned body of work by Joan Jonas (b. 1936), developed through our artist commission The Island Project: Point of Departure.
On September 30, 1971, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson purchased a small tidal island off the coast of Maine, sight unseen. Accessible on foot only at low tide and protected from development, the island is shaped by weather, erosion, and time. Although Smithson initially sketched ideas for artworks there, when Holt and Smithson visited the site in 1972 t was clear to them that leaving the island to simply be was enough.
Five decades later, The Island Project: Point of Departure invited five artists—Tacita Dean, Renée Green, Sky Hopinka, Joan Jonas, and Oscar Santillán—to think with the island. Islands are places of continual change: sites of imagination and lived geography that often register environmental and cultural shifts first.
At the Farnsworth, Jonas presents her response to this invitation. A close friend and collaborator of Holt and Smithson, she shared with them a generational rethinking of what art could be. Jonas has created an installation of stones sourced from local granite quarries, mapping the contours of Little Fort Island. These are accompanied by drawings that evoke the island’s presence and agency, alongside recently rediscovered experimental video footage from the early 1970s. Filmed by Jonas at curator Joseph Helman’s home in St. Louis, the footage captures Holt, Smithson, Helman, his family, and the artist Richard Serra in conversation about art and its conditions.
The exhibition also includes works by Holt and Smithson that focus on the island, as well as video and photography in which Jonas appears, including two photographic works by Holt from 1968 and the 1969 video East Coast/West Coast.
The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Holt/Smithson Foundation, and is co-curated by Farnsworth Chief Curator Jaime DeSimone and our Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre.
Nancy Holt, Over the Hill [detail] (1968)
Inkjet print on archival rag paper; composite made by the artist from original 126 format transparencies
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
Edition of 5 + 1AP
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
