A visual artist interested in sound, Jennie C. Jones is a composer in both senses of the word.
With their muted palettes and modular configurations, Jones’s works harken back to the postwar abstractions of painters like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, who made a virtue of empty space, and pay homage to the Black musical avant-garde of the 1950s, such as free-jazz pioneers who turned strategic silence into a statement.
Jones employs a similar tactic. Her canvases combine elements of both painting and sculpture, but their effect is as aural as it is visual. Often incorporating acoustic panels—her signature material—they shape the sound in the rooms where they’re installed. Don’t expect a profound sonic shift, though. The effect is barely perceptible. More than anything, they invite you to stop and listen, to contemplate the ambient waves of sound already swimming around—and their relationship to the history of minimal aesthetics.
“Listening,” Jones has said, “is a conceptual practice” all its own. It’s a strategy that asks, rather than demands, your attention. Finally, it seems, the art world is tuning in.
On view now at the Guggenheim is “Dynamics,” a mid-career survey of Jones’s output. It’s the perfect setting for such a show, given the museum’s rich collection of Modernist art—also a major interest of the artist’s—and its iconic architecture, which allows for an art experience that sounds, acoustically, unlike any other. The exhibition features canvases, drawings, and other works from the past decade and a half of Jones’s career, as well as several new pieces, including a site-specific audio track that envelops the museum’s spiral with droning tones.
On the occasion of the exhibition, we visited Jones at her studio in Hudson, New York, where she talked about embracing gesture, John Coltrane, and her own upstream path to recognition.
You often begin talks by showing a photo of John Coltrane at the Guggenheim. Given that your exhibition at the museum is the reason we’re speaking today, I thought that might be a good place for us to start. What does that photo mean to you and your practice?
I started my talks with that photograph in like 2005-ish. I feel like I’m kind of moving on from that, but it’s a really beautiful, cyclical story to say that I manifested an exhibition in the very space that I was pointing to institutional critique. What interested me about that photograph was his gaze, staring directly at the viewer, and then you glance down and he’s pointing at his instrument case in this very assertive way, as if to say, ‘This is my form of art, this is my form of Modernism.’
What was the original context of that photo? Do you know?
When we were first talking, Lauren Hinkson, the curator of my exhibition, sent me other photographs [of Coltrane]. He was just a visitor. I think it was 1953. But it had nothing to do with the work that was up or for an album cover or anything like that. It’s interesting, that kind of interchange between art and music and inclusion and exclusion in narratives around Modernism.
So that was the scene you were setting for your lectures?
It was a specific [way for me to] ask the question, ‘Where am I in this narrative?’ As someone who’s incredibly brainwashed in the deep end of art school, working with a ton of art history from my teenage years, I was looking for myself in these narratives and looking for ways to push against the canon—to critique and engage with it at the same time.
You mentioned your background. I’ve read that you grew up in a creative household?
I think so. It was a very ’70s household. It was free, no shoes, running around. My dad was smoking weed in the garage—that kind of situation. Good and bad free-range parenting on occasion. [Laughs] But my mom was really the cornerstone of the creative energy of our house. She taught Montessori school very briefly. We had lots of literature and music and records in the house. We had a piano, which I quit. Then I wanted to play the violin, which I quit. In a dramatic way, I always say that I wanted to just hide under the dining room table and make drawings instead. But when no one was home I would make up crazy songs on the piano. That was the beginning of the private improvising studio practice.
What kind of music were you exposed to early on?
Definitely a big range. Folk music for sure. Richie Havens, Cat Stevens, Doobie Brothers—that was early. My mom had an extensive interest in jazz and also South American music and samba. Then my brothers—one was into hardcore Rolling Stones rock-n-roll and the other one was hardcore P-Funk, Ohio Players. By the time I was in high school I had processed all of that. So I loved everything from Astrud Gilberto to Crass and Black Flag. Then I was goth for a while, with the depression and the big Flock of Seagulls bangs and [I was into] Cocteau Twins and Joy Division and Morrissey.
When did you start to make visual art?
I don’t even know. Maybe it’s just the last two years! It was a blessing and a curse: I was one of those kids, if you asked me when I was seven what I wanted to be I would say, ‘artist.’ I was lucky enough to also go to a great school system. We moved to the right side of the tracks just enough [for me] to go to the better school district. It was well worth it and incredible, but also isolating and strange, and [there was] not a lot of diversity. By high school I was taking AP art classes. I recently found a paper that I wrote for my English class. The prompt was just to write a compare and contrast. I think I was 15 and I wrote about Fauvism and Cubism. It was basically straight from an encyclopedia, but to think that I was 15 in Ohio trying to figure out these two massive ways of seeing and making work…
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