A pioneer of performance and video art, Joan Jonas works in video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational works that are equally at home in the museum gallery and on the theatrical stage. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas invests texts from the past with the politics of the present. By wearing masks in some works, and drawing while performing on stage in others, she disrupts the conventions of theatrical storytelling to emphasize potent symbols and critical self-awareness. From masquerading in disguise before the camera to turning mirrors on the audience, she turns doubling and reflection into metaphors for the tenuous divide between subjective and objective vision, and the loss of fixed identities.

An innovative and genre-crossing pianist, composer, and bandleader, Jason Moran has a venerable career as a recording and performing musician, marrying classical, blues, and jazz with hip-hop, funk, and rock in ways that continually expand genre boundaries. Moran has collaborated with jazz masters such as Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, as well as the drummer Nasheet Waits and the bassist Tarus Mateen in the trio, The Bandwagon. Moran also collaborates extensively with a broad range of visual artists, including Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Julie Mehretu.