Jennie C. Jones

Jennie C. Jones, sonic and visual artist, creates works of painting, collage, sculpture and sound that engage with the history of American modernism and minimalism while investigating avant-garde music of the same era.  

Through her innovative approach to object-making, she often paints on acoustic panels that in their industrial use, are designed to absorb sound. These deeply contemplative, multidimensional compositions invite audiences to be present for and sit with connections to sights, space, history and sound. Located conceptually where the visual and sonic meet, her work tells a more complete story of cultural contributions made by artists of modernism and African American sonic practitioners working in parallel to one another.    

In her first solo museum show, “Higher Resonance,” hosted by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, her paintings of muted gray and fluorescent yellow were accompanied by a re-composition of music by Olly Wilson and Alice Coltrane, among others. And for her outdoor sculpture at the Clark Institute in Massachusetts, she fashioned a wind-activated harp, one that would “sing to the permanent collection,” more specifically to stormy seascapes by Winslow Homer that Ms. Jones read as portraits of the Middle Passage.

“Dynamics,” Ms. Jones’ 2022 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, marked the first solo presentation by a Black woman in the museum’s rotunda. The show included a sound installation that sent her subtle tones throughout the museum’s spiral. Like her acoustic panels’ ability to diffuse sound, the neon colors in her paintings appeared to produce their own light, reflecting their hue onto gallery walls.