Event Listing - Museums

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Sat Oct 13, 2007 - Thu Jul 31

Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things


Website

Location
Date and Time
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2626 Bancroft Way
Berkeley, CA 94720 map
cross street: between Bowditch and College
district: Berkeley

Sat Oct 13, 2007 (W - Su 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Th 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.)
Sun Oct 14, 2007 (W - Su 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Th 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.)
Wed Oct 17, 2007 (W - Su 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Th 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.)
Thu Oct 18, 2007 (W - Su 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Th 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.)
Fri Oct 19, 2007 (W - Su 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Th 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.)

Description
One of the most ancient and revered of Hopi traditions is the snake dance, an intense and magical ritual performed at the close of a sixteen-day community celebration. During the rite, priests dance with snakes in their teeth, after which the snakes are released back into nature as messengers of Hopi harmony with the spiritual and natural worlds. In the 1960s, the young New York–based artist Joan Jonas was deeply influenced by the snake dance and other Hopi rituals she saw during a journey to Arizona. In her mesmerizing multimedia installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, Jonas revisits these deeply embedded memories of the American Southwest through yet another influence—an essay she had recently read by the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), whose own nineteenth-century visit to the American Southwest shaped his influential view of Western art.