A few weeks ago, artist Jennie C. Jones made his way to the top of the spiral at the Guggenheim Museum to test audio tracks for “Oculus Tone,” a serene, drone-like sound installation she was designing for her exhibit now at the museum.
The space was demanding, with its dome of skylights, recessed exhibition spaces and open central volume that ran down. As she worked with Piotr Chizinski, the museum’s head of media art, decisions became clear: which speakers to use, which sound files to modify or discard.
“As someone who works with parameters and likes parameters because it forces you to think in different ways, I think it’s great,” Jones said later. “The riddles are fun to solve.”
Jones, 53, is an artist who unites sound and form in more ways than one. She is an abstract painter whose works channel the austerity of minimalism, but with acoustic panels – the kind used in concert halls or music studios – on top of the canvas. Her drawings nod to the music world with elements of sheet music notation or acoustic waveforms.
Her audio pieces match their settings, while subtly challenging them. She filled Philip Johnson’s glass house in New Canaan, Conn., an essential work of Western modernism, with a hum produced in part by glass and metal singing bowls. In a large hall in New Orleans, which once housed Confederate artifacts, she recorded three choirs performing “A City Called Heaven,” a utopian black spiritual.
‘Dynamics’, Jones’ current Guggenheim exhibition, collects works in all these forms, in a setting with its own long association with modernism, from its architecture to its collection and programming. The exhibition is a major solo museum presentation in New York for an artist whose practice is as sensory as it is cerebral.
She swam against the current for a long time. As a teenager in suburban Cincinnati, Jones was a black kid who loved punk rock. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she delved into post-war modernism in the late 1980s and formed an abiding attachment to abstraction – with a penchant for artists such as Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly or Agnes Martin – which did not join the brewing culture wars and increased interest for art directly related to identity and social representation.
During the same period, she immersed herself in the black sonic avant-garde, from post-bop to contemporary classical composers and especially in the field of improvisation-led music that emerged in the 1970s around figures such as Cecil Taylor or the Art Ensemble. of Chicago, becoming known as ‘creative music’. The exclusion of these currents from the history of modernism, as taught at the time, became the creative provocation that has inspired her work ever since.
These interests placed Jones in a relatively thin line of black modernists who were undervalued in their day, from Jack Whitten or Alma Thomas to the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) or the St. Louis-based Black Artists’ Group – networks and collectives that acted equally in music, art, writing and political thought.
Today, Jones is out of sync with certain trends – embraced by the market – such as the turn towards figuration and black portraiture. But her followers, including great musicians and scholars, admire what they see as her foresight and perseverance.
Scholar and composer George Lewis, the author of the AACM’s definitive study, called her “fearless.” “She claims her right to abstraction,” Lewis said. “I take Jennie as a model to say, well, you can fight that and you can win.”
For the poet and theorist Fred Moten, who wrote a text for a recent Jones exhibition in Chicago, she is along the lines of Whitten, Thomas or Sam Gilliam in “questioning the normative ways in which we think about abstraction.” Black abstraction, Moten said, arises from social existence, as in the “outsider” art of Thornton Dial or the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Ala.
Despite all the intellectual love, Jones’ work is also meant to be felt, more simply. Her techniques invite the viewer (or listener) to experience something that is not quite captured by one of those senses, but somehow appeals to both, in a kind of vibrational transmission.
“When you spend time looking closely, you start to hear things,” said Lauren Hinkson, the associate curator, collections at the Guggenheim who hosted the exhibit.
In the paintings it starts with a kind of trompe l’oeil. From afar they look like color and line studies on canvas, but they are three-dimensional and contain acoustic panels – a material she introduced in 2011 in a groundbreaking exhibition in the Kitchen. These paintings don’t emit sound, but they orientate it: Their placement in a room determines how you hear the space.
Another Jones signature is painting a red or yellow stripe on one side of the canvas or its top, perpendicular to the wall, so that when the light falls, it creates a diffuse glow. It’s a visual effect, yet not that different from an auditory hum.
Similarly, the quick flashes of feedback that sweep across the soundscape in “Oculus Tone,” installed at the top of the Guggenheim spiral but gently permeating the entire cylindrical volume, have some affinity with the sharp streaks of color that intersect. the monotonous surface of some of her paintings, installed on the lower levels of the spiral.
It is a matter of suggestion, ultimately to everyone’s own eyes and ears. “I feel like there are multiple entry points,” Jones said. “I hope there’s some poetry and feeling and nuance.”
Recently on a frigid day, Jones, who is a lively and engaging conversationalist, offered a visit to her studio in Hudson, NY. She moved to the city in 2018 and bought a tiny house after living as a tenant in New York City for more than two decades – mostly in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
While she has received recognition—the Joyce Alexander Wein Prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012 and exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2013 and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston in 2016—her career has not been lucrative. Her gallery representation has been intermittent and she has taught part-time at Bard College and the Yale School of Art.
She moved north the year she turned 50. “It was time for a reset,” she said. She joined the elite Alexander Gray Associates gallery. “Jennie’s career is an objective lesson,” said Gray, the gallery owner, “to be an authentic artist and operate outside the box.”
Jones works alone; she even tried to make acoustic panels, but returned to buying them commercially – “Fibreglass is a nightmare, it’s toxic and terrible,” she said. She produces her sound pieces with Audacity’s free software, preferring to keep the work simple, without filters or complex effects. She paints on the floor, “listening to music and dancing around.”
Although her pieces for the Guggenheim had already traveled, she had hung other works that exemplify her recent “jumping materials and pushing and thinking paint in different ways.”
She now applies pieces of architectural felt to her paintings. “It’s a different material to play with,” she said. She can paint on it, so it can be both a surface and a marker. But she also makes some pure paintings without panels or other accessories.
“I love painting and I hate painting,” she said. For a long time she felt burdened by her role in the great story of art history, and more interested in paintings as objects. Her new monochrome works are those of her younger self, she said, perhaps self-indulgently.
A new bright red piece brought out the “hot glow,” she said. “I’m crawling away from gray.” On the white underpainting for a composition in progress, she pointed to the dashing strokes and impasto – a contrast to the discipline of the finished works.
“There’s a private expression taking place,” she said. “It starts off incredibly free and gesticulating, and then it’s a process of removing the mark. In a way, I feel like I can have it all.”
There is a similar liberation at work in Jones’ approach to music as material.
She still refuses to call herself a musician: “I gave up piano,” she said. “I have stopped playing the violin.” She prefers ‘pretend musicologist nerd’. Though she listens and researches in depth, the revelation that made music the center of her art came easier when she realized some 20 years ago that she had gone to as much effort in selecting music as she did in her drawings and paintings.
In the 2000s, Jones often made small sculptures using objects related to listening to music – earphones, cassette covers, CD racks – and drawings on these themes. But when those items disappeared in the transition to digital music, she moved away from this language instead of cultivating it for nostalgia. Her sculpture is now mostly sonic, in her site-specific audio installations.
“I feel like my work is braver now,” Jones said. “I feel like I’m in my own skin.” But she’s still not aiming for the mainstream. She learned from the avant-garde cats that operating from the edges is also a choice: “It’s not like I’m working on the margins because I’m placed there,” she said. “Although I’ve always been the crazy on the periphery, I’m happy here.”
