Open to the public. Advance registration requested.

This discussion, held at the Dallas Museum of Art, will consider the relationship between performance art and its related ephemera, examining how sculptural permanence impacts the field and its place in museums and collections. The panel includes multi-disciplinary artists Joan Jonas (attending virtually), Maya Stovall, and Naama Tsabar, moderated by curator Adrienne Edwards.

About the Speakers

Adrienne Edwards

Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Previously, she served as Curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator-at-Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to nearly fifty interdisciplinary performance commissions, Edwards’s curatorial projects have included Blackness in Abstraction at Pace Gallery, New York (2016); the travelling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts (2018-2019); ASSEMBLY for Frieze New York’s Live Program and the Artist Award (2018); Moved by the Motion’s Sudden Rise (2020) at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's solo exhibition The Story I Tell Myself and performance commission Disturbing the View (2021) at the Whitney; My Barbarian's twentieth-anniversary exhibition, performances, and catalogue (2021-2022) at the Whitney and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Quiet as It's Kept: 2022 Whitney Biennial (2022); Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side (2023), a four-part suite of performances and photography, video installation, and catalogue. She was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. She has taught art history and visual studies at New York University, the New School, and The Graduate Center at CUNY. She is a frequent contributor to a range of artist monographs, anthologies, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals. Edwards was President of the Jury for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas' experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Jonas has exhibited, screened and performed her work at museums, galleries and large-scale group exhibitions throughout the world, such as: Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The Museum of Modern Art in New York will host a retrospective of her work in 2024. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, presented to those individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

Maya Stovall

Maya Stovall (b. Detroit, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose work is associated with the politics of space and place and the anthropology of white supremacy through video, performance, neon sculpture, and post-internet methods. Major works involve projects included in the Whitney Biennial 2017; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Art Basel Miami Beach; White Columns NYC; Blaffer Art Museum & Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center at the University of Houston; Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture & San Francisco Art Institute; Cranbrook Art Museum; Aka Artist Run Saskatchewan, Canada; and University of Aarhus, Denmark. Her works are represented in the public museum collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; Cranbrook Art Museum; and The Whitney. Her Detroit monograph, Liquor Store Theatre, was published by Duke University Press. She is Assistant Professor, California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona and is represented by Reyes Finn, Detroit and Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles.

Naama Tsabar

Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the viewing experience to one of active participation. Tsabar draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Between sculpture and instrument, form, and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within this transitional state. Collaborating with local communities of female-identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Tsabar’s first institutional exhibition in Germany will open at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in October 2023. She has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (as a MATRIX artist in 2022) and the Bass Museum, Miami, FL (2021-22). Additional solo exhibitions and performances have been presented at KinoSaito, Westchester County, NY (2022); the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC (2019); Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2018); CCA Tel Aviv (2018); the Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires (2018); the Museum of Modern Art and Design, New York (2017-18); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Prospect New Orleans (2017); High Line Art, New York (2016); MARTE-C, El Salvador (2015); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013); and the Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel (2006). Selected group exhibitions featuring Tsabar’s work include the SMART Museum, Chicago (2022); the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (2021); the Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels (2021); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2020); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019); Elevation 1049, Gstaad, Switzerland (2019); the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2018 and 2015); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium (2017); TM Triennale, Hasselt Genk, Belgium (2016); ExtraCity, Antwerp, Belgium (2011); MoMA PS1, New York (2010); the Bucharest Biennale for Young Artists (2008); and Casino Luxembourg (2008). Tsabar received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010. Her work is held in private and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Bass Museum, Miami; the Seattle Art Museum; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Perez Art Museum Miami; and the Tel Aviv Museum.

The 2023 Nasher Prize is presented by The Eugene McDermott Foundation and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger.

Nasher Prize Education and Community Programs are sponsored by The Donna Wilhelm Family Fund, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo / The Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, and Patricia J. Villareal and Thomas S. Leatherbury.

Nasher Prize Dialogues are sponsored by the Bowdon Family Foundation, Michael Corman and Kevin Fink, Gagosian, Janelle and Alden Pinnell / The Pinnell Foundation.