Ted Jonsson

Ted Jonsson

A manipulator of metallic media, Ted Jonsson has been sculpting large scale, public sculptures since the 1970's. His work has been commissioned for college campuses and federal buildings, as well as attracting private collectors. He has an active professional career as an instructor in sculpture as well as participating on boards and additional involvement through artist groups and juries. Many of his monumental creations can be seen in and around Seattle, but also at locations elsewhere around the nation. Some are fluid, some geometric, but all work within a “universal” sculptural language. His streamlined visual compositions are meant to be legible and explicit to the “lay viewer.”

Jonsson strives to "avoid topical or fashionable connotation." Through "simplicity and directness of form," he attempts to work outside of artistic fads, or reflections of societal and cultural "moods" of which he says are subject to "change from generation to generation." Instead, he explores "symbolic imagery" which he says "has a universal quality when experienced." And although he believes that "visual art should speak for its generation, to evoke a substantive response from thoughtful viewers," he strives for "the direct statement, free of obscure decorative ambiguities." In other words, Jonsson is dedicated to maintaining a straight-forwardness in his metal compositions, requiring nothing but a glance to experience an immediate visual exclamation. No matter what age a viewer is, Ted Jonsson wants to pique their interest with the “purely visual relationships” displayed by his sculptures.

Born in Berkeley, California in 1933, Jonsson attended University of California at Davis and was the school’s first BFA graduate in 1957. After his undergraduate studies, he joined the US Army and became a courier plane pilot. Jonsson became “enamored” with the landscape of Washington State, flying frequently between Fort Lewis and the Yakima Firing Center. He started as a painter at UC Davis, but then later at the University of Washington, after his military service, he took to sculpture and architecture, ultimately receiving his MFA. He concurrently studied in the school of architecture, because he “leaned more toward three-dimensional situations.” While at the University of Washington, Jonsson started exhibiting in regional shows around the Seattle area, notably the Seattle Art Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists in 1964. A wealth of awards and exhibitions followed the 1964 Northwest Annual Exhibition and lasted through the 1970s.

Between 1965 and 1967, Jonsson exhibited at the Anacortes Art Festival, the University of Washington Pavilion, the University of Oregon Museum of Art, the Henry Gallery (for his MFA thesis exhibition in 1966), another Northwest Annual Exhibition in 1966, and a show called “Sculpture 1967” at the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion. Additionally, he had won several awards at the 1965 and 1966 Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts show in Bellevue, first prize at the Renton Art Festival in 1966, and first prize at both the Pacific Northwest Annual in Spokane and the Burien Art Festival, both in 1967. Jonsson was said to have been seen flying with his sculpture strapped under his Cessna airplane “over the mountains from Seattle to Spokane” to the Pacific Northwest Annual “for delivery to the exhibition.” These events led to the conception of Yin/Yang, the work which is in the Seattle Art Museum’s collection.

In 1966, Jonsson exhibited at the Attica Gallery of Seattle some “strange” objects. According to Seattle Times’ Art Reviewer, Anne G. Todd, Topol Tendrill and Topol Genus II, “elbow-tube sculptures” with “motor attachments which cause[d] them to breathe” were included in the exhibition. Apparently, Topol Tendrill “soughed its black diaphragms,” making a breathing noise as air moved through the sculpture while Topol Genus II “hung from the ceiling.” However, these mechanized sculptures became just a minor part of Jonsson’s oeuvre, once he developed a more “refined simplicity of form.”

In September of 1967, Jonsson created a model in this new style for a work which was never realized in its full, large-scale form. Yin/Yang, a 25 x 25 in. chrome-plated steel sculpture, has been in the Seattle Art Museum’s study collection since it was given as a gift from Ellen Thurston in December of 1986. A year after its initial creation, Yin/Yang was chosen for a 1968 exhibition called “The West Coast now: current work from the western seaboard,” to represent Washington. This show of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California artists counted Jonsson among only ten other Washingtonian artists. Jonsson's mature style is apparent in Yin/Yang, with its “harmonious bisexual anthropomorphism” as well as its chrome-plated exterior, and this visual immediacy would later be a signature of Jonsson’s large scale sculptures. Pantopol, commissioned in 1972 for the SeaTac Airport, was Jonsson’s first “major” large-scale public work, and is stylistically similar to Yin/Yang.

After “The West Coast now” show in 1968, Jonsson went on to produce large-scale works, participate regularly as an art juror, instruct college classes, and exhibit consistently through the 1970s. He showed at 21 invitational exhibitions in the late 1960s through the 1970s, including three more Northwest Annual Exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum in 1974, 1975-76, and 1977 . He went on to produce four more large-scale commissions in the 1970s: Chimera, the Seattle Water Department fountain in 1975; Tetradigm at the University of Alaska in 1976; the Olympia Technical College Central Plaza sculpture in 1979; and Sinusoidral for the Alderwood Mall, also in 1979. Jonsson was an instructor in the art department at Highline Community College from 1968-1979. Although Jonsson continued to exhibit occasionally in the 1980s, he was regularly commissioned for large-scale metal sculptures throughout the decade. However, both his exhibition and public work commissions dwindled in the 1990s, and his last “major” commission was for a fountain executed in the Kennely Commons at Green River Community College in 2004.

Ted Jonsson is affiliated with the O.K. Harris Gallery of New York City and the Davidson Galleries in Seattle and his work is in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Washington State Art Collection, the Seattle Public Art Collection, the Manoogian Collections, and the De Bartola Collection. Jonsson is accessible via his website at tjonsson.com and by phone at (206) 547-4552. His address is listed as 805 Northlake Way, Seattle WA, 98105.


Blake Nakatsu, curatorial intern for Northwest Art, 2014