Jennie C. Jones

Jennie C. Jones (born 1968) is an American artist best known for her abstract works in painting, sculpture, and sound art. Much of Jones's work is inspired by minimalism and color field painting, along with jazz and avant-garde music.

As an artist, she connects most of her work between visual art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. Jones has won an array of prizes and grants for her work, including the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize in 2012.

Early life and education Jennie C. Jones was born in 1968 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she grew up in the city. and her father Byron Paul Jones worked as a radio engineer for the Cincinnati–area station WLW after previously co–owning a jazz radio station in San Antonio. Growing up, Jones was exposed to a broad variety of music by her parents, particularly from her mother's record collection. Jones was made to take piano and violin lessons as a child by her parents; although she was able to play compositions immediately after hearing them, she refused to learn to read music and soon quit the lessons. She was particularly inspired by seeing Kelly's minimalist paintings installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. She then attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, earning an MFA in 1996. In the summer of 1996, Jones was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. After earning her graduate degree, Jones moved to Brooklyn, New York, a group show at the Studio Museum in Harlem that helped introduce the concept of post-blackness and post-black art to a broader audience. She exhibited a wall piece titled Homage to an Unknown Suburban Black Girl featuring an image of a child with an afro, set within a grid similar to the art of Mondrian. Jones was awarded a Creative Capital grant to support her work in 2008. She also received the William H. Johnson Prize the same year, a grant for African–American artists awarded by the William H. Johnson Foundation.

In 2009, Jones mounted a solo exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Red, Bird, Blue. She exhibited several works on paper and sculptures referencing jazz musicians and abstract artists like Dizzy Gillespie and Ellsworth Kelly. One room in the exhibition included monochromatic wall paintings and a sound installation of collaged jazz performances mixed with the call of the northern oriole.

2010s Jones staged Electric in 2010, a solo exhibition at the gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co in New York. Jones created a sound work for the show featuring one minute of the Miles Davis song "In a Silent Way" from the album of the same name, slowed down and extended to the length of John Cage's composition 4′33″, playing from iPods in two adjacent rooms. She also created sculptural installations of CD racks full of empty jewel cases and sculptures comprising tangled and stretched audio cables plugged into walls.

In 2011, Jones began her Acoustic Paintings series, minimalist monochromatic painted works made on fabric acoustic panels often used to dampen sounds or echoes in recording or performance spaces. Many of the snippets are so-called micro-samples, or samples of individual notes or musical phrases rather than entire melodies. Writing for BOMB magazine, musician Stephen Vitiello suggested that the samples had been "given a new context, perhaps to be classified in a category of black minimalism".

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., mounted Higher Resonance in 2013, Jones's first solo museum exhibition. In addition to thirteen new Acoustic Paintings and small sculptures, Jones created a new audio work, also titled Higher Resonance, featuring short samples of music by black classical composers and jazz musicians mixed together.

In 2014, Jones presented the sound work Piccolo Largo in a group exhibition at Wave Hill in New York. The piece features a high-pitched piccolo playing against a very low-pitched tuba. The same year, she mounted a solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York titled Tone, where she exhibited a sound installation made of slowed-down snippets from performances by trombonist and arranger Melba Liston, as well as several new Acoustic Paintings.

Jones staged another solo exhibition with Sikkema Jenkins in New York in 2015, Amplitude, where she showed seven Acoustic Paintings along with a new sound work. The sound piece, Red, Cue, Disruption, was a reworking of a previous piece comprising collaged recordings of drummer Elvin Jones. In December 2015, Compilation, a 10-year survey of Jones's work curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. In addition to twenty two of her Acoustic Paintings, Jones showed a number of works on paper, sculptures, and an ambient sound installation titled Variant Static, a compilation of spliced recordings Jones sourced from a woman selling her father's record collection. She also installed a listening room for viewers to hear fourteen of her other audio works on a looped recording. Writing about the exhibition for the Houston Chronicle, Molly Glentzer called it "a little bit Barnett Newman meets Charlie Parker". Jones created a site-responsive commission titled RPM (revolutions per minute) the same year for the Philip Johnson-designed Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The installation included a sound piece produced in part with glass and singing bowls,

Jones also moved from Brooklyn to Hudson, New York, in 2018 after two decades in the city. The same year, she was included in the outdoor group exhibition Ground/work at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Jones's sculpture for the show, These (Mournful) Shores, consisted of a wall–height minimalist interpretation of an Aeolian harp with strings that audibly responded to the wind and weather. The work was inspired by several Winslow Homer paintings owned by the Clark as well as the experiences of enslaved people in the Middle Passage. Several of the paintings included bright strips or patches of color hidden behind the felt or acoustic panels that were only visible from certain angles. She also presented a number of musical score collages with abstracted musical notations. Jones participated in the fifth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial, also in 2021, exhibiting in a two-artist show with Glenn Ligon in an unused library annex in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Accompanying Ligon's neon artworks commemorating the dates of removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in New Orleans, Jones installed a sound piece comprising gospel choir recordings of the civil rights anthem "A City Called Heaven", often associated with Mahalia Jackson, set against an original composition by Jones of drone sounds, bells, and snippets of works by experimental composer Alvin Singleton.

In 2022 Jones staged Dynamics, a solo exhibition of new work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in tandem with a retrospective of abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. She installed a series of Acoustic Paintings on the first two levels of the Guggenheim's spiral ramp along with several works on paper. Jones presented a sound installation on the top floor of the museum titled Oculus Tone, a largely ambient composition that filtered into the rest of the museum building.

Jones was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2025 for the museum's annual roof garden installation. She created three red metal sound sculptures, collectively titled Ensemble, which were enlarged, geometric interpretations of historical instruments like the diddley bow, zither, and Aeolian harp. The works emitted distinct sounds as wind blew through their strings on the roof. The curator, Lauren Rosati, said the show was part of her aim to introduce viewers to art in mediums like sound and video.

In September 2025, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis staged a survey exhibition of Jones's work, A Line When Broken Begins Again.

Style and analysis Jones is a visual and sonic artist whose paintings, sculptures, and works on paper incorporate ideas around minimalism, abstraction, jazz, and Black history. Oliver noted in her “Outside The Lines” catalogue essay, that “working in painting as well as sound, she has mined the politics, culture and aesthetic innovations of the mid-20th century and has emerged with sharp criticisms and astute queries that are now embedded in the work. Jones's work challenges us to understand the frameworks of modernism, which embraced black musical forms but excluded black visual art from its canon".

In the book, Jennie C. Jones: A free and shifting tonal center, she states, "Achieving intimacy with the viewer is important; it happens through surfaces that invite looking - at sides, edges, and hums that are audible but visual".

The audio pieces are constructed using traditional sound editing methodologies and often have their origin in historic recordings. With the amalgamation of industrial acoustic materials, often used in recording studios and listening rooms, Jones's art focuses on building a bridge between two-dimensional works, architecture, and sound. Jennie has stated that "conceptualism allows these different media to occupy the same space.” Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, Florida, 2014 The Lower East Side Printshop Special Editions Resident, 2011 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, Italy, 2008 American Academy in Rome, Italy, Visiting Artist, 2008 Liguria Study Center for the Arts & Humanities Fellowship in Genova, Italy, 2004 Cité internationale des arts residency in Paris, 2002–03 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency World Trade Center, 1999

Awards Heinz Award, 2024 Joan Mitchell Award Grantee, 2013 The Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, 2012 Art Matters Grant, 2012 Pollock-Krasner Grant Recipient, 2000

Works in public collections Walkman Compositions-Sanya (AM-FM) & the Sanyo M-G25 Radio #5 (2008–2009), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Walkman Compositions-Sanya (AM-FM) & the Sanyo M-G25 Radio #9 (2008–2009), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York End Measure (2011), Los Angeles County Museum of Art Semitone–Bar (2011), Los Angeles County Museum of Art Components: Left Resonance (2012), Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Shhh and Electric Clef (2012), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Dark Gray with 1/2 Measure (2013), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Higher Resonance (2013), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Light Gray with Middle C (variation #2) (2013), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Five Point One Surround (2014), Museum of Modern Art, New York Single Channel with Receiver (2016), Museum of Modern Art, New York Constant Structure (2020), Pérez Art Museum Miami Corner Measure with Red Bar (2023), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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