Jonas Wood

amfAR Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS

Born in 1977 in Boston, Jonas Wood was introduced to art an early age thanks to his grandfather’s collection, which included works by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol. He continued his education as a young adult. Majoring in psychology and minoring in studio art, he received a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1999. He then graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle, with an MFA in painting and drawing in 2002.

After art school, Wood moved to Los Angeles where he currently shares a studio with artist Shio Kusaka, to whom he has been married since 2002. The couple often work together, creating correspondences between their art. They have even exhibited together, notably in 2015 when Gagosian in Hong Kong mounted Blackwelder, which featured the art of Woood and Kusaka. The couple’s first collaborative museum exhibition took place at Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Netherlands, in 2017.

His paintings embrace a variety of genres—portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and interior scenes, among others—but always draw from his lived experiences.

Wood’s first solo museum exhibition was held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2010. Dallas Museum of Art organized Wood’s first major survey show, a career-spanning 33 works, in 2019.