Transdisciplinary artist Jennie C Jones incorporates her music with her paintings and sculptures—transcending categories and producing work that is holistic. She creates a homogeneous entity that exists independently and marks her work incomparable while interweaving philosophy to solve relational problems. Her work is episodic. As Jones said, “I think about iterations, variations on a theme, and little, microscopic steps and changes.” She thinks about subtle gradient shifts and how we listen—and to being mindful about architecture and how sound works in a space. Jones continues, “I think of the work as siblings or partners, and sometimes they stay together, especially the works on paper. Those are in groups because they’re like scores. The paintings, they’re more standalone.” Positioned in front of her paintings requires reading it as a conceptual transfer of time, both visually and audibly.

Her work is minimalistic, but not reductive. Jones looks at minimalistic as potential and opportunity, “that maybe relates directly to African American improvisation and creative utility, to working inventively with spare means. It speaks to an ability to refine or home in, in my case on a line or consideration of proportion.” Balance, grace, and craft define her thought-provoking work. She invites her audience to “listen” to her paintings. Whether it be ambient noise, music chosen for her exhibition, or her own scored music—it resonates over the surfaces creating listening areas like in Higher Resonance and Phrasing to the Floor.  These areas bring together the interactions of sight, sound and thought.

In 2011, at the Kitchen in New York, Jones, as an emerging artist, left her drawing and printmaking beginnings and started developing her acoustic paintings. Using acoustic panels allowed for more prominent works and connected the white space and sound. By introducing color on the boards, the artist depicted the energy associated with the sound. Jones introduced The Red Series at The Kitchen. At the Hirschhorn show in 2013, The Yellow Series came into being. Both colors represent a higher intensity of color. Jones conceptually talked about jazz music in mid-century modernism and how racial issues shook out as they left blacks out of the visual fields of fine art, but highly regarded them in the jazz era as musicians. During this same period, she was editing instrumental sounds for the first time. This higher resonance layering extended its conversations into the realm of Olly Wilson and Alvin Singleton, who were familiar with jazz and produced hybrids of jazz with classical. Jones, like them created works of minimalism—modernisms in sound and the visual realms. The Blue Series followed with pieces like Blues in C Sharp Minor (for Teddy Wilson) to represent both Klein blue and the blues…low vibrancy music.

Her set of drawings represent her own scores. Score for Sustained Blackness works very much like Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings as it is a site for introspective viewing. As Jones explains, “it’s about sustaining a tone, but it is also about sustaining an identity.” This exhibition showed black history colliding with art history and using music to tell the stories.

In RPM (Revolutions per Minute) at the Glass House, her commission brought together audio collages and works on paper extending her ongoing engagement with visual and audio abstraction. Press here to watch the video and experience this work. In 2021, she repeated the same type of experience in New Orleans at Prospect 5 where she “invites reflection on Black Histories and Futures through a consideration of earthly and spiritual possibility.”

Jones is represented by Patron Gallery and Alexander Gray.

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