Aurora Picture Show Award and Gala
11th Annual Aurora Award Dinner Honoring Joan Jonas

Aurora Picture Show's annual Aurora Award Dinners are unparalleled events honoring some of the most significant media artists of the 21st Century and 22nd Century. The Aurora Award is an honor given to an artist who has exhibited extraordinary originality in the fields of media and multimedia art. 

Aurora Picture Show presented the 11th annual Aurora Award to artist Joan Jonas in October of 2011.  Joan Jonas is a seminal figure in American post-war contemporary art and works in several mediums including: performance art, video art, sculpture, filmmaking, photography and painting. In 2009 the artist was awarded the Guggenheim’s first annual Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jonas has had retrospectives at the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2003), Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart Germany (2000), and at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994). The artist has been represented in Documenta V, VI, VII in Kassel, Germany. Jonas was featured in the International Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale where she installed Reading Dante II. Most recently, the artist presented Reading Dante II at the Performing Garage in New York as part of Performa ’09.

Jonas has been awarded fellowships and grants for choreography, video, and visual arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the CAT Fund, the Artist TV Lab at WNET/13 (New York City), the Television Workshop at WXX1 (Rochester), and the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst  (DAAD) in Germany. Jonas has received the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize at the Tokyo International Video Art Festival, the Polaroid Award for Video, and the American Film Institute Maya Deren Award for Video.

As part of the event, Aurora will screen works of Ms. Jonas throughout the evening via multiple projections at the site.  These works include an installation screening of Jonas’ READING DANTE SERIES, inspired by the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, and MIRAGE, which was motivated by a trip the artist took to India.

Each year Aurora selects a Texas artist to create an art piece symbolic of the Aurora Award.  This year Elaine Bradford will create a sculpture that will be presented to Joan Jonas during the award presentation at the gala.  Learn more about Elaine Bradford.

Past Aurora Award honorees have been Christian Marclay (2010), Doug Aitken (2009), Steina and Woody Vasulka (2007), Miranda July (2006). Isaac Julien (2005), Ant Farm (2004), Laurie Anderson (2003), William Wegman (2002), and Tony Oursler (2001).