Jennie C. Jones

Jennie C. Jones practice mines the territory of Modernism—abstraction and minimalism; experimental jazz; and seminal political and social shifts—to reveal the complex and often parallel legacies of the mid-20th century’s social, cultural, and political experimentations.  Jones brings to light the unlikely alliances that emerged between the visual arts and the imprint of jazz, highlighting the way they became and continue to exist as tangible markers of social evolution and political strivings.

” As a conceptual artist, Jones is adept in a variety of media including the visual genres of painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as sound. In fact, her work often intertwines these media. Jones frequently uses iconic phrasing from jazz vocalists and instrumentalists as raw material that she fragments, disrupts, and dissolves into associative sounds, which in turn function as distinct installations or in combination with sculpture or installations of her now emblematic “Acoustic Paintings.” These Acoustic paintings–minimalist in nature–are composed using monochromatic canvases with soundproof panels. The resulting works, often presented as a suite or installation, evoke a physiological response by the viewer, whose recognition of the material triggers an internal expectation of sound. Jones plays upon this psychological expectation, and she often incorporates fragmented sound to mine deep emotional and psychological territories. This practice is evident in an exhibition she created entitled From the Lowinwhich the artist created a suite of black on black paintings. This suite of paintings was combined with a sound composition or “re-composition” appropriated from low, deep cords and dark notes extracted from the music of well-known jazz musicians. Jones has continued this exploration into the intersections of politics, history, the practice of minimalist painting, and the language of experimental, improvisational jazz with her most recent installation Higher Resonance presented at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2013).”   — Valerie Cassel Oliver

Jones attended Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts where she received her Masters of Fine Art degree in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelors of Fine Art in 1991, with Fellowship.  Her awards include a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2000 and a Creative Capital grant in 2008. She received The William H. Johnson Prize in 2008, and is the 2012 recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Wein Prize. She has presented lectures at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Jones’ work has been exhibited at major art institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and Urbis Art Center in Manchester, UK among others. Her solo exhibition, Higher Resonance, was presented at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington DC in 2013. Upcoming projects include a solo project at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, opening in December 2015.

Jones has participated in numerous prestigious artists residency and fellowship programs, both nationally and international, including: Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1996), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency at the World Trade Center (1999), Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2002-2003), The Liguria Study Center for the Arts & Humanities in Genoa, Italy (2004), and Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida (2014). In 2008 she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center as well as a Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome.

She has works in The Deutsche Bank Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.

 

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