jonathan gonzález

Jonathan González (@thirdlyrelevant ) is a choreographer and artist whose practice explores the relationships between Black performance, dance, architecture, and the built environment. Working across movement, photography, and installation, González considers how bodies navigate and respond to space, using choreography as a way to examine history, perception, and collective experience. Commissioned for the Whitney Biennial, ‘magic hour–golden time’ unfolds over three days across the Whitney Museum’s (@whitneymuseum ) terraces, with five performers activating the architecture through a durational choreography timed to the passage of sunset. Alongside the live work, González presents photographic choreographic scores tied to each terrace and hour of movement. In parallel, ‘Body Configurations,’ presented at The Shed (@theshedny ) as part of Frieze (@friezeofficial ) New York, extends these ideas through photographs and sculptural directives exploring the relationship between body, environment, and space. The final two performances of ‘magic hour–golden time’ take place tonight and tomorrow, May 16 and 17 from 4–7 PM. Frieze New York remains on view through May 17.

Frieze Week x Whitney Biennial magic hour–golden time at the Whitney Biennial. [May 15, 6-9 pm | May 16 + 17, 4-7 pm] Body Configurations at The Shed. Grateful for the conversation with @ike_chuks for Frieze mag and for all the collaborators, performers, curators, producers, and friends carrying these works into the world. @friezenewyork @friezeofficial @whitneymuseum 👕: @ian__mcrae 📸: @nixonnixon

“Each in their own way, Jonathan González (@thirdlyrelevant ), Symara Sarai (@symarasarai ’), and their collaborators center questions of Blackness in their self-portrayals, drawing on physical, musical, linguistic, and cultural vernaculars to explore how these embodied lineages continually rub up against the stuff of their worlds,” says our writer. “These questions play out through their deft and purposeful articulations of effort and ease, and while the tone and resonance of their works differ markedly, these two artists show how strategies of Black resistance and survival reverberate from their bodies into the world.” 🌐 𝚠𝚠𝚠.𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚎-𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚑𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚊𝚜𝚝.𝚌𝚘𝚖 #dancenthusiast #jonathangonzalez #symarasarai #abronsartscenter @abronsartscenter #thekitchennyc @thekitchen_nyc

Today ! 📆 Repost from @ccsbard • Join us Friday, May 8, for the inaugural CCS Bard Method Camp! 11am - 4pm, Collection Teaching Gallery For the full symposium schedule, please visit the link in our bio. Participants: Lara Fresko Madra, Harris Feinsod, Jonathan González, Shannon Mattern, Dawn Chan, Suzanne Kite, Eugenie Tsai, and Jordan Weber. Organized by Mariano López Seoane. “CCS Bard Method Camp: Research” inaugurates a new annual symposium at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College dedicated to examining the foundational practices that shape curatorial work and its adjacent fields. Conceived as a space for reflection on method rather than outcome, this first edition focuses on research—not as a neutral or preliminary stage, but as a situated, generative, and often unruly practice that underpins artistic, curatorial, and scholarly production. Across disciplines, research names a wide spectrum of activities: observation, collection, speculation, verification, immersion, and translation. It may unfold systematically or intuitively, collaboratively or in isolation; it may take the form of archival excavation, fieldwork, embodied inquiry, or conceptual construction. Rather than stabilizing these differences, Method Camp approaches research as a set of evolving practices shaped by context, urgency, and desire. What does it mean to begin with a question? How does a line of inquiry take form, and for whom? At what point does research become legible—or deliberately resist legibility? This one-day symposium, organized by Mariano López Seoane, consists of two 90-minute panels bringing together artists, curators, and scholars. The program foregrounds case-based reflections on process, offering insight into the intellectual, material, and affective dimensions of research across fields. Image: Anne Collier, “Despair,” 2005. Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Gift of Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg. Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.

some excerpts from Full Tilt with @thirdlyrelevant and @margueriteangelicamonique 🌟🫂🪡🌪️🌫️ thank you to everyone who came to the performance last month! the exhibition remains up at @ccsbard until May 24th, including Jonathan’s rehearsal notes presented in the space that served as their green room during the performance. & thank you @lucas_ondak for writing so beautifully about the performance for The Brooklyn Rail — 🔗 in bio! 📷: 1-5 — by Michael Valiquette @michael_valiquette 6-9 — by Alon Koppel

“Lifetime of Movements Compounding” Thank you to @lucas_ondak for this thoughtful writing in The Brooklyn Rail on Full Tilt, curated by @devon__ma at CCS Bard. Grateful to Devon and @margueriteangelicamonique for the collaboration and shared work, and @willjrawls for the stellar conversation in the exhibition’s catalogue ♥️ Photos by @michael_valiquette Read the full piece @brooklynrail (link in bio)

Swerve Fatigue continues... ⭑.ᐟ “The swerve is something that begins as a minor adjustment and accumulates into a collective condition...” 🌀❤️‍🔥⁠On the occasion of Jonathan González’s multi-week residency (March 23–April 9) and public presentation of Swerve Fatigue at The Kitchen on April 10–11, 2026, Assistant Curator and organizer of Swerve Fatigue Angelique Rosales Salgado speaks with González about queer nightlife, archival throughlines in The Kitchen’s programmatic history, black femme voices at the center of popular music, desire, and enduring tensions in life that offer no immediate resolve, plus much more. Responding to questions around notions of intimacy and embodiment in their practice as a choreographer and writer, and in Swerve Fatigue, González shares: “… intimacy, then, is not about securing closeness but about remaining available to that instability when our touch meets. embodiment here becomes a site of return without resolution, where touch, sound, light, and haze can be encountered again, differently, without being fully known...” Read the full conversation in our online magazine On Mind, originally published within the performance program, alongside documentation by photographer Elvin Tavarez and filmmaker Rudy Gerson. Performers are Ananda Naima González, India Lena González, Marguerite Hemmings, Kingsley Ibeneche, AJ Wilmore, and Wayne Arthur. Sound design by Alexis De La Rosa and GENG PTP. Production by David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen, Greta Hartenstein, Producer, and Nora Chellew, Stage Manager. 🔗 Head to the link in bio for more __________ Image credits: 1, 6, 7, 11–13, 17, 18) Photos by Elvin Tavarez @estudioelvin . 2) Beverly Buchanan, standing in Marsh Ruins, concrete and tabby, 1981. © Beverly Buchanan. Photograph courtesy the artist and Jane Bridges. 3–5) Swerve Fatigue Performance Program. 8–10, 14–16, 19) 16mm stills by Rudy Gerson @_ruudbwoy .

A Letter from Kiara Benn '20, Assistant Director for Programming/Assistant Curator for Performing Arts, Center for the Arts Last year, artist Jonathan González sent me their new book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, asking me to sit with it and notice what surfaced. As I sat with the text, which depicted assemblages drawn from González’s life, histories of placemaking through methods of refusal, and future imaginings of convening, I found myself returning again and again to González’s attention to land and water as sites of history, rupture, and possibility. Those feelings will shape a day of gathering, listening, and movement on Friday, April 24, 2026. Rather than situating the program in a “room,” we chose to situate ourselves on a piece of land with a history of resistance, and to sit with our surroundings and the echoes of those who have cultivated Black spaces, allowing place itself to become an active collaborator. At the Cross Street Dance Studio and within the Beman Triangle, you are invited to consider how histories of Black placemaking, both intentional and improvised, continue to resonate. These sites hold layered narratives of community and care, reminding us that land is not fixed, but alive with memory and ongoing transformation. In this way, the day rejects singularity. It asks us to shift away from binaries and toward multiplicity: to notice what happens when we gather across time, space, and discipline. The progression of the day is an attempt to construct place together, and propose a map towards resistance. Each event is a step toward placemaking together with the hope that when we leave the place we’ve created together, that it continues on with each of us. These include a reading and performance workshop led by González that invites attendees to engage with the land through the lens of his book and embodied reflective prompts, and a conversation between González and Darius Jones, Assistant Professor of Music, as they think through their respective practices as insurgent propositions. I hope you will join us for this unfolding (link in bio), a convergence where the act of coming together becomes, itself, a form of possibility.

THANK YOU 🙏🏾 I LOVE MY CITY 🌆 I LOVE MY TEAM 🫂 @kingsleyibeneche @anandanaima @margueriteangelicamonique @itsyagurlindia @domdamatrix @_ruudbwoy @waynethur @delabae_ @genggrizzly @isilberis @norachellew @gretahartenstein @ang.pdf @thedavidriley @tassboogie @friedplatano #swervefatigue

Choreographer, writer, and artist Jonathan González’s (@thirdlyrelevant ) new ensemble work Swerve Fatigue reconciles the embodiment of black life in dance. The performance is a continuous ritual, one that does not conclusively start or stop. Those invited in to bear witness enter an existential realm that precedes them. Voyeurs stumble upon the work. With intimate proximity, they encounter and embrace it. ⁠ ⁠ The project mobilizes what it means to swerve; the verb serves as an initial directive. Through this choreographic impetus, Swerve Fatigue investigates how the imprecision of brisk motion can catalyze fusion among bodies, and necessarily so. At The Kitchen at Westbeth, ensemble members—Ananda Naima González (@anandanaima ), India Lena González (@itsyagurlindia ), Marguerite Hemmings (@margueriteangelicamonique ), @kingsleyibeneche , AJ Wilmore (@domdamatrix ), and Wayne Arthur (@waynethur )—transmute their individual intuitions into collective affect. Sound designers Alexis De La Rosa (@delabae_ ) and GENG PTP (@genggrizzly ) construct the sonic reverie enveloping the resulting unit.⁠ Across a performance score rife with particle physics, the natural world, and the opacity of nightlife, intertwined via a throughline of chance, Swerve Fatigue delineates its own space-time among the here and now. ⁠ ⁠ The swerving body may try with all its might to evade collision, but success is not always a guarantee. González’s piece opens up to the possibility of failure not just as an inevitability but as a horizon of generation. Performers metabolize the obstacles they endure in the face of uncertainty to engender their communion.⁠ ⁠ Jonathan González: Swerve Fatigue⁠ 🔗 Multi-week residency: March 23–April 11, 2026; Public Rehearsals: April 10–11, 2026, 7:00pm. (SOLD OUT)⁠ ⁠ Photo by Elvin Tavarez @estudioelvin .⁠ _________⁠ Artist spotlight by Emma Huerta (@muertahuerta ), Kitchen 2025-26 Intern⁠