Jonathan Brilliant
Available Exhibitions
Jonathan Brilliant has spent nearly two decades transforming mundane consumer ephemera into monumental site-specific installations. Working with materials most people discard without thinking—stirrers, sleeves, lids, fortune cookie slips—he creates labor-intensive sculptural environments that interrogate consumer culture, question our relationship with "nature," and celebrate the absurd poetry of repetition. His practice is equal parts craft tradition, endurance performance, and institutional critique—obsessive, self-aware, and surprisingly moving.
Since 2006, Brilliant has installed work in galleries, museums, public spaces, and festivals across the United States and internationally, from the McColl Center in Charlotte to the Cairns Festival in Far North Queensland, Australia. His "Have Sticks Will Travel" world tour (2009-2010) brought site-responsive installations to thirteen galleries in eighteen months. He's a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a South Carolina Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellow, and a practiced collaborator who understands institutional needs, tight timelines, and the architectural realities of diverse exhibition spaces.
This portfolio presents five distinct but related bodies of work, each available as a traveling exhibition or site-specific commission. Whether you've worked with Jonathan before or are encountering his practice for the first time, these projects offer scalable, adaptable experiences that engage audiences through humor, labor, materiality, and surprise.
Installations
Brilliant's monumental indoor installations transform gallery spaces into immersive environments constructed entirely from coffee shop materials. The centerpiece of each installation is a massive woven structure made from 30,000–60,000 coffee stirrers, assembled on-site using only tension and compression—no adhesive, no fasteners, just patient, repetitive weaving that can take 50–100 hours of continuous labor. These structures hang from ceilings, wrap around columns, fill corners, or cascade across walls like enormous, fragile cobwebs.
The installations function as site-specific responses to architecture, revealing the character of each space through obsessive, repetitive making. They're labor made visible, consumer culture made sublime, and craft practice pushed to absurd extremes. Viewers consistently describe them as meditative, overwhelming, beautiful, and slightly insane.
Exhibition includes:
[Number of installation components TK]
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Space: [Square footage, ceiling height]
Duration: [TK weeks/months]
Special needs: [Ceiling attachment points, lighting]
Installation time: [TK days on-site fabrication]
Materials: [Provided by artist or institution]
AI: Reverse Engineering Memory
What happens when an artist feeds two decades of his own work, writing, and life documentation into AI systems and asks them to explain his practice back to him? This proposed body of work explores AI as a kind of external memory, unreliable narrator, and funhouse mirror. Brilliant is interested in the way large language models confidently interpret his fortune cookie obsession, misremember his exhibition history, and invent plausible-sounding theories about why he does what he does. The AI becomes both curator and critic, offering readings of his work that are simultaneously insightful and completely invented.
The project raises questions about authorship, memory, archive, and identity: If AI can generate a convincing artist statement based on scraped data, what does that say about artistic intention? If it can invent exhibition reviews that sound real, what is the difference between documentation and fabrication? And if an artist's entire practice can be summarized, analyzed, and repackaged by an algorithm, what remains that is genuinely human?
This is both a conceptual investigation and a practical experiment in how artists might use AI not as a production tool but as a reflective surface—a way to see their own work from an impossible outside perspective. The exhibition could take multiple forms: printed AI-generated texts displayed as wall labels, an interactive chat interface where visitors ask the AI questions about Brilliant's practice, video documentation of Brilliant responding to AI's interpretations of his life, or [other forms TK].
Exhibition includes:
[Physical form TK: prints, interactive stations, projections, videos]
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AI-generated texts analyzing Brilliant's fortune work, installation practice, biography
[Documentation of artist's responses to AI interpretations TK]
Installation requirements:
Space: [Square footage TK]
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Special needs: [Interactive technology, screens, printing, TK]
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Technical support: [TK]
Each of these projects can be adapted to specific institutional contexts, budgets, and timelines. For inquiries, space planning, or detailed proposals, contact: [contact info TK]
Fortunes
What began as a personal collection of fortune cookie fortunes in 2001 has evolved into Jonathan Brilliant's most traveling and adaptable body of work. Starting with the cheap prophecies tucked into his $7 college combo meals, Brilliant began gathering, framing, scanning, enlarging, and ultimately fabricating his own fortunes—reinterpreting them at monumental scales and inserting them into public space like guerrilla affirmations. The work nods to Penn and Teller's cup-and-ball routine, Joseph Kosuth's text pieces, and Barbara Kruger's public interventions, but maintains an earnest vulnerability that distinguishes it from pure conceptual art or advertising parody.
These large-scale fortunes have appeared in parks, on building facades, in museum courtyards, and alongside political campaign signs during election cycles. They've been printed on paper, screenprinted on Rives cream, embedded in acrylic cookies, and wheat-pasted onto walls. The fortunes themselves toggle between the banal and the profound: "An unexpected windfall will be yours," "Your mind is creative, original and alert," "You have an ambitious nature and will make a name for yourself." What was once given as a disposable post-meal tchotchke becomes a public artwork that people photograph, share, and internalize—a democratic intervention that costs nothing to experience but lingers in memory.
Exhibition includes:
[Number of fortune installations TK]
Original framed fortune cookie fortunes from 2001–present
Large-scale reproductions (dimensions TK)
[Clear acrylic fortune cookies, if applicable]
Documentation of public interventions
Installation requirements:
Space: [Square footage TK]
Duration: [TK weeks/months]
Special needs: [Wall space, pedestals, outdoor capacity TK]
Installation time: [TK days]
Outdoor Installations
Brilliant’s outdoor sculpture work includes large-scale woven steel structures, fortune interventions in parks and plazas, and site-specific responses to civic spaces. These projects maintain his signature concerns—repetition, labor, consumer culture, text-based communication—but reimagine them for permanence and public engagement.
"Woven Structure" (2013), a permanent commission in North Charleston, translates his coffee stirrer weaving technique into welded steel, creating a massive sculptural form that echoes basketry traditions while reading as contemporary minimalism. His "Field of Good Fortune" (2011) at the Columbia Museum of Art scattered supersized fortune cookie messages across the museum lawn, turning outdoor space into an unpredictable game of accidental prophecy. His "Campaign of Good Fortune" (2013) inserted fortune messages into public space during municipal elections in Grand Rapids, Raleigh, and other cities—a pointed, funny commentary on political messaging and civic hope.
Outdoor work allows Brilliant to reach audiences beyond gallery walls and to test his materials and methods against weather, time, and public interaction.
Exhibition includes:
[List of outdoor works available TK]
Documentation of past commissions
Proposals for site-specific outdoor projects
Installation requirements:
Space: [Outdoor area, dimensions TK]
Duration: [Temporary or permanent TK]
Special needs: [Structural engineering, permits, weather protection TK]
Installation time: [TK days/weeks]
Materials: [Steel, printed vinyl, other TK]
Comedy Club/Gameshow
Text to come
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