Jonathan Brilliant
2026 - 2028
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.
Massive woven structures constructed from 30,000-60,000 coffee stirrers, assembled on-site using only tension and compression. These architectural installations transform gallery spaces into immersive environments—labor made visible, consumer culture made sublime, craft practice pushed to absurd extremes.
What happens when an artist feeds two decades of his own work, writing, and documentation into AI systems and asks them to explain his practice back to him? This timely conceptual project explores AI as external memory, unreliable narrator, and funhouse mirror—examining how large language models confidently interpret artistic intention, misremember exhibition history, and invent plausible-sounding theories about creative work. The AI becomes both curator and critic, offering readings that are simultaneously insightful and completely fabricated. Perfect for institutions interested in the intersection of contemporary art practice, technology, and questions of authorship, memory, and identity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Campaign of Good Fortune is a series of fortune yard signs for activations across the country, timed to coincide with election cycles when temporary signage proliferates in public space. These signs bear fortune cookie messages and are distributed by participants in their yards, offices, and public spaces. Ideal placements are directly alongside political campaign signs, inserting moments of optimism and absurdity into the visual landscape of electoral politics.
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.
My installation is designed to be a prop for the use of my character “Brilliant”. Situated in the gallery is his signature game show “Minimalist Mania”. The show is an exhaustively researched love letter to the artists and movements that began with the minimalists of the mid 1960’s and continue with many sculptors today.
Two Item Minimum is a functional comedy club installation featuring a sound booth, backstage hallway, and small stage built inside a gallery. A one-act script about comedy club staff is performed and recorded within the space, which then operates as a working venue hosting actual open mic nights.
