Lives of Consequence
Jonas Wood '99
Artist
The work of contemporary artist Jonas Wood ’99 is featured in the permanent collections of the world’s most renowned museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, among others.
Known for multidimensional and partially abstract paintings, drawings and prints of rich color and complex form, Wood “negotiate[s] an uneasy truce among the abstract, the representational, the photographic and the just plain weird,” as a 2011 New York Times review noted. Wood’s art achieves this balance “with a dour yet lavish palette, tactile but implacably workmanlike surfaces and a subtly perturbed sense of space…”
Born in Boston, Wood graduated from Hobart College with a degree in psychology, but it was a minor in studio art that helped set him on a path to international artistic acclaim. The influence of his mentor, Professor of Art and Architecture Nicholas Ruth, steered him in the direction of graduate art studies at the University of Washington, where Wood earned an MFA.
Today, his “lush interiors, tender portraits, and vibrant still lifes” (Artnet) are on display around the world — in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Broad, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and elsewhere. His murals and solo exhibitions include Primitives: Chris Caccamise and Jonas Wood, Cerealart, Philadelphia (2007); Hammer Projects: Jonas Wood, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Clippings, Lever House Art Collection, New York (2013–14); Shelf Still Life, High Line Art, New York (2014); LA><ART Facade, Los Angeles (2014); and Still Life with Two Owls, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2016).
In 2019, Wood was featured at two major shows: an exhibition of new work at the world-renowned Gagosian gallery in New York City; and his first major solo museum exhibition in the United States in almost a decade at the Dallas Museum of Art. The New York exhibition showcased Wood’s “boldly colored graphic works [combining] art historical references with images of the objects, interiors and people that comprise the fabric of his daily life,” according to materials from the Gagosian. “Translating the three-dimensional world around him into pure color and line, he confounds expectations of scale and vantage point, causing the flat picture plane to bristle with an abstract charge.”
A 2019 collaboration with French fashion house and luxury retailer Louis Vuitton brought Wood’s work to an even wider audience. The Louis Vuitton x Jonas Wood textile collection of scarves, shawls and stoles features his reinterpretations of Louis Vuitton’s iconic monogram pattern, along with many of the artist’s best-known subjects, including plants and basketballs.
Based in Los Angeles, Wood is married to artist Shio Kusaka. They have two children.