Artist Statement


For over thirty years, master installation/performance artist and community visual activist Jonas dosa Santos has been working in a multi-disciplanary mode, creating performances, installations, murals, paintings, drawings and sculpture.  He is known for exploring social environmental issues and cultural identities.  The focus of his research has been the visual arts, ethnic dances, non-verbal theater, pagan and religious rituals and body movement.  He has studied ritual –  the carefully choreographed repetitive movements that transmit underlying social meaning as magic, the unexpected and spontaneous.  His performance/installations have been designed to engage participants of diverse and intergenerational cultural backgrounds and professions, as well as the initiated and uninitiated, in the arts, in the creation of the artwork.