Jennie C. Jones is a sonic and visual artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, audio compositions, and installation and is deeply impacted by the legacies of conceptualism, modernism, and minimalism. Jones’s deep engagement with Black experimental jazz, improvisation, and avant-garde music is apparent in her work. Her use of objects related to music and sound—including acoustic absorber panels, cassette tapes, and harp strings—has been a key component of her practice for decades, and these materials take on completely different purposes in what Jones describes as her “personal, distilled vernacular.”
As well as being an artist, Jones is an insightful interlocutor and a thoughtful and generous writer with a true passion for art and art history. As evidenced by our conversation, she does not shy away from asking us to look closely at institutions and all that happens within them. I first became familiar with Jones’s practice when I worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and I got to know her work better in 2012, when Jones was in a Studio Museum–wide exhibition cocurated by Naima J. Keith, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, and me that brought together a group of autonomous installations and projects by various makers under one umbrella. Later that year, Jones won the Studio Museum’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, and in 2016, she was one of four artists I invited to respond to Alma Thomas’s work for the catalog of the artist’s survey exhibition that I cocurated. Jones’s contribution was a beautiful and insightful reflection on abstraction and Thomas’s legacy. That was the moment when my dialogue with Jones began, and it has since evolved alongside our respective artistic and curatorial practices.
On the horizon for Jones are two major projects: the Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the last in its current footprint before the museum renovates its modern and contemporary galleries—opening in April 2025, and an exhibition of her own work and a curatorial project at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, opening next fall. We met at her studio in the Hudson Valley.
Women by Women, a series of interviews between women visual artists (in this instance between a visual artist and a curator), is made possible by the Deborah Buck Foundation with additional support from the Judith Whitney Godwin Foundation.
Lauren Haynes: I’m excited to continue the conversation we’ve been having for—
Jennie C. Jones: —forever.
LH: Forever. So let’s start with approach. When an institution reaches out to you about a project, how do you engage the space?
JCJ: With reverence and mindfulness, thinking about chains of events that occurred in and are connected to a place and its architecture. I’ve been invited to engage with spaces that are modernist in their architectural aesthetics, and my work fits in them but almost as a bait and switch. My work arrives through the side door with a critique and a resonance, highlighting who has or has not been allowed in these spaces before. For the project at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in 2018, for instance, I made a sound piece for the Sculpture Gallery with the voices that have been kept outside of that gated compound. The Sculpture Gallery was built in 1970, and I asked myself what was happening around then and brought voices from that time into this kind of sacred space. In the Hirshhorn Museum in 2013, my work was sandwiched between the Ellsworth Kelly and the Clyfford Still galleries. No pressure. But installing a sound piece that I knew would bleed—sound bleeds and ruptures the spaces around it—audiences would hear my piece while looking at Kelly and Still. Their experience would be disrupted. The sound included samples from the jazz musicians Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Wendell Logan, among others. It wasn’t a siren song but a radical insistence. At the Clark Art Institute in 2020, I extended an arm of Tadao Ando’s pavilion out into the landscape, stretching it just a bit further and turning it into a piece that would be activated sonically by the wind.
...
Read full article at bombmagazine.org.
