Her short silhouette is instantly recognisable, capped by her light, bobbed white hair, and she is always accompanied by a jaunty little dog high-stepping beside her to keep up with her determined pace. These sightings have always made my heart skip a beat. A sighting like a rare bird for an ornithologist. A sighting that is my equivalent of spotting an A-list celebrity. 

Jonas, a born-and-bred New Yorker celebrating her 90th birthday in July of this year, now leans on a walking stick as she moves, but her stride seems unaffected. Back in the early 1970s she was part of a community of artists who took over Manhattan’s historic SoHo district, an area full of empty light-industrial workshops in cast-iron buildings that were perfect for artists’ studios. In 1971 she bought a large studio loft on Mercer Street and has been living and working there ever since. In interviews, Jonas speaks of her love of her Mercer Street home studio but her distaste for the changed landscape of SoHo, which most people now know only as a luxury shopping destination. It is fascinating to think of all the changes this pioneering artist has witnessed in her extraordinary life.

Ever since I read the groundbreaking Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which exposed the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use and is now cited as foundational to the creation of the environmental movement, I have been curious to speak to someone who was deeply affected back in 1962, when the book was first published in three parts in The New Yorker. I finally got my opportunity during  this Brownstone Cowboys conversation with Jonas, who was in her mid-20s at the time of Silent Spring's publication. “I remember when it came out,” she recalls, “It was unbelievable, actually. And people were very upset. And it all came true. She was right. In my last piece I quote her. She’s a poet.”

The last “piece” that Jonas is referring to is an installation called Moving Off the Land II, first exhibited in Venice, Italy in 2019. As part of the performance that took place in the installation, text from Silent Spring is recited by various performers. At one point, a group of children are heard reciting a section of the text that describes a world altered by the disappearance of species like insects and birds. A prophetic reality. 

“Nature. It is all miraculous,” Jonas states simply. “One of the reasons I started having children in my performances comparatively recently was because working on this fish or the ocean piece, I wanted them to experience it, because we are losing everything. I want people – children particularly – to know what we are losing."

Ever since her first performances were photographed and filmed in the 1960s, Jonas has expressed herself through video, drawing, sculpture, sound and live performance. The natural world has continuously been present in her artistic output over the decades, and I was curious to know how someone who grew up so convincingly urban had such an affinity with nature. “When I was a child, I went to the White Mountains in New Hampshire every summer. I was very lucky, you know,” explains Jonas. “And so I always wanted to get out of New York in the summer.” In her 20s, with a group of friends that included musician Philip Glass and artist Richard Serra, she started to visit Cape Breton, an island in eastern Canada, part of the province of Nova Scotia. “I loved being near the sea, and the fresh air reminded me of the White Mountains.” 

Jonas has owned a small property in the coastal community of Inverness, since the 1970s. She has been deeply influenced by the local landscape and the seascape and is fascinated by the Gaelic folkloric traditions that are embedded in this area. The outdoor performance event Nova Scotia Beach Dance from 1971 is one of her earliest site-specific works linked to Cape Breton, and was one of the first of her performances to use the natural environment. In the video recording of the event, Jonas is a small figure seen from a distance repeating a set of rhythmic movements against a backdrop of the vast, open seascape. The landscape, the beach, the wind are all collaborators. She continues to make art both in nature and in her studio in Nova Scotia during the summer, returning to her Mercer Street studio during the rest of the year.

I start working with the peculiarities of particular technologies.

In the late 1960s Jonas began working with what was then a new medium: the domestic video camera. These days it's hard to imagine a world where everyone doesn't carry a camera at all times, documenting everything, but of course this was not always the case. On a trip to Japan in 1970, she bought her own portable Sony Portapak video camera to document her performances. She was among the first generation of artists to adopt video as an artistic medium. This puts her alongside artists such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, who were also early adopters of this technology. “For me everything is a technology. Even the pen on paper. It all has to do with tools that you use to realise your ideas. Even video, I had no idea before I started using it what it would lead to. Then I start working with the peculiarities of particular technologies which interest me.” Despite her adaptive nature, Jonas does admit, “I do not know that much about AI yet but I find it disturbing.” She is not alone in that sentiment.

The Drawing Center, founded in 1977 as a museum and nonprofit exhibition space, has always been based in SoHo and is a quick, two-street Jonas-style march from her studio on Mercer Street.  In 2024, to coincide with her major retrospective at MoMA, the centre hosted Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, the first in-depth survey show of more than 300 works on paper by Jonas dating from the 1960s. The drawings formed a wide-ranging ecosystem that included dogs, horses, foxes, rabbits, birds and other creatures. Jonas has always incorporated the act of drawing into her work. In some performances she can be seen live-drawing from memory, often using a long stick capped by chalk, charcoal or ink that extends the distance from between herself and the paper she is drawing on. She follows a cycle of documentation, revisiting the same motifs. The drawings are fluid, and the creatures featured seem to be in perpetual motion, very much alive.

Among the organised clutter of her Mercer Street studio, a place of life and work and study, there are animals everywhere. But the only real animal is Jonas’s most adored companion, a recently rescued puppy called Freddy, who shares the space with tiny horse figurines, ceramic bunnies, and a myriad of painted birds and dogs. Souvenirs of the natural world are on every surface. Rocks are carefully placed on window sills; elsewhere there are shells, twigs, all interspersed with mirrors and art making materials. Jonas is incredibly comfortable in front of the camera, a natural subject, at ease in her body, happy to perform. Of course this ease seems inevitable given her years spent as a multidisciplinary performance artist as well as a revered collaborator who has worked with other performers such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer and musicians Philip Glass and Jason Moran.

I had no idea what it would lead to — then I started working with it.

When our conversation ends, Jonas leaves for an appointment and I take the lift to the ground floor. Before exiting on to the street I pause in the lobby, not really wanting the interview to be over. I take out my phone to snap a souvenir, the simple word “JONAS” on her mailbox. She carries with her the living memory of an experimental New York that is fast disappearing. She is not just a witness to an era of artistic invention, but one of its makers. A living thread connecting the experimental SoHo of the 1970s to the uncertain times we now inhabit. Like the environments Jonas has spent a lifetime observing and defending, what she represents feels both enduring and increasingly rare