On a brisk morning a few weeks ago on the roof terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artist Jennie C. Jones was previewing “Ensemble,” her suite of elegant, angular sculptural works for the museum’s annual Roof Garden commission, which opens on Tuesday.
Three sculptures glistened in the sunlight, each produced according to a precise geometric design. One was a trapezoid resting on one of its sides, a notched groove bisecting its face. Nearby was a large angled structure with a vertical aperture that stood roughly twice human height. The third work included two tapered panels, tilting askew to form a small “V.” Across each sculpture stretched a set of taut strings, fastened by piano pegs — seven on one piece, five on another, one on each side of the third.
The materials were clean: powder-coated aluminum and concrete travertine, the latter inspired by the Met’s own architecture. The palette was equally concise — two shades of red, the main surfaces wine-dark, accents in a scarlet hue. A fourth piece, in the brighter tone, stretched flat along two edges of the garden’s perimeter like a carpet runner, as if to demarcate the stage.
It was the first time back on the roof for Jones since installing the works, so when a light breeze moved across one of the sculptures at a certain angle, causing its strings to emit a rich audible hum, she savored the effect.
“I’m thrilled!” Jones said. The sound hovered, overriding the ambient city noises, until the wind shifted, leaving a gently dissipating resonance. “Wow,” she said. “She’s performing. It works. Right on cue.”
Jones, 56, has long incorporated sound in her art — if not always audibly, then conceptually. Her drawings, sculpture and paintings frequently employ materials and motifs that suggest a sonic presence, like audio cables and CD jewel cases in her early work, or acoustic panels, of the kind used in recording studios, in her ongoing series of hybrid paintings.
She also makes sound works that collage samples from Black classical or avant-garde music or explore drone-like vibrations. These site-specific tracks have filled spaces including at a Confederate memorial hall in New Orleans, Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., and the upper floors of the Guggenheim Museum, as part of her major 2022 survey exhibition there.
On the Met roof, she is deploying another tactic: sculptures as potential musical instruments. Their forms draw equally on the abstractionist canon and on Black artistic breakthroughs that this canon has typically ignored or excluded. They draw connections between Minimalist greats like Ronald Bladen or Tony Smith (whose work once appeared on this roof) and improvised instruments made by Black rural musicians. (To some, they may also recall the 1960s sonic sculptures of the artist and designer Harry Bertoia.)
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