In 1972 Joan Jonas became both a sorceress and a dog. The metamorphosis happened while she was performing as her mask-wearing alter ego, Organic Honey. She drew cryptic symbols, plunked pennies into a bowl of water, and threw her image across multiple monitors using video technology.

Then she transformed. She looked into one of the monitors displaying Organic Honey’s reflection, and began to yowl at it like a canine.

Descriptions of the event make it sound less like performance art than a conjuring. “She was present, but not present,” the curator Joan Simon has said, noting that Jonas “was revealing something.” Jonas, for her part, said she was trying to channel “magic and witches, those women who were outside of the culture and who were knowledgeable.”