Jennie C. Jones's solo exhibition, Year of Construction: 1970 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada, will be on view April 17–August 3, 2025.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto's press release follows:
Jennie C. Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the histories of American modern art and avant-garde music, along with the cultural and socio-political forces that shaped these movements. Through research and a practice of attentive listening, she uncovers unexpected connections between styles, visions, and both prominent and overlooked figures. By recomposing these elements, Jones creates audio collages, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper that reveal a more expansive and evolving history of abstraction.
Year of Construction: 1970 is an audio collage originally commissioned for the Sculpture Gallery (1970), designed by architect Philip Johnson on the same New Canaan, Connecticut property as his iconic Glass House (1949). The piece is an assemblage of predominantly Black sonic practices from 1970, a pivotal year marked by the end of the Vietnam War, the death of Jimi Hendrix, the first Earth Day in the United States, the inaugural issue of Essence magazine, and the rise of Black political representation, among other significant events. Including the sounds of musician Alice Coltrane, composer Alvin Singleton, percussionist Milford Graves, and multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, Year of Construction: 1970 “climbs into a crescendo of sound before spiraling back down to the soft tone at the start of the piece,” sonically mirroring the movement of bodies and light within staircases.
