Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) is a sonic and visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes audio collages, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and sound installations in which she investigates correlations between looking and listening. Many artists have been inspired by music – for example, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) listened to jazz while working in his studio and infused the rhythms and harmonies into the collages for which he is best known, and the abstract paintings of Alma Thomas (1891-1978) and Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) made visual the auditory sensations of music. Jones, however, materially embodies sound in her work. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jennie C. Jones earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991, then studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received her Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 1996. After two decades in Brooklyn, Jones moved to Hudson, New York, in 2018.

Jones grew up listening to music – from punk rock to experimental jazz. Her early work includes minimalist drawings and collages that reference audio devices, and sculptures she assembled from objects associated with the transmission of sound. As the technology of listening became increasingly digital, Jones turned her attention to conceptually based inquiries into the properties of sound and the materials that shape sonic experience. She was also drawn to the innovative experimentation of Black avant-garde sound artists, such as the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The visual manifestations in her work of the tensions between improvisation and controlled structure, harmony and dissonance, and repetition and variation illumine her interest in the explorations of synesthesia by the Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), for whom music was also a stimulus for and corollary to visual abstraction.

Interrogation of modernism, the disjunction between historical narratives of European American and African American modernist abstraction, and the intertwined trajectories of abstract art and avant-garde music are central to Jones’s artistic practice. She cites as influences the abstract painters Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) as well as Alma Thomas and the quilters of Gee’s Bend.1 Her work also probes the silences and exclusions within these narratives. Curator Valerie Cassel Oliver writes, “Much like the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, Jones mines the phenomenon of invisibility and the paradox of representation within the visual and musical avant-garde with immense clarity, The artist’s use of monochrome frames the ideological pitfalls of modernism, particularly its exclusion of women and black artists among its ranks… For her, abstraction is a radical means to more deeply anchor aesthetic histories and contemporary culture to a communal corporeality that refuses invisibility and erasure.”2

Jones often incorporates in her paintings architectural felt and acoustic panels, materials designed to absorb and dampen sound. The acoustic properties of her work encourage attention to silence as well as sound, while her polyrhythmic arrangements of visual and material elements and their subtle textural variations call attention to the beats and pauses for breath between musical bars and phrases. “The artistic practice of Jennie C. Jones amplifies silences and gaps with very little noise,” writes curator Janine Mileaf, adding that Jones utilizes acoustic textiles “to intensify the weighted silence in the room while making present the resonances of black avant-garde music.”3 The voices of arts practitioners within the Black visual and sonic avant-garde that have been hearkened to, muffled, and silenced thus reverberate aurally and visually in her work.

In Deep Gradient, Left Resonance (2014), a diagonally bisected black rectangle of acoustic panel, placed slightly off-center, overlays a dark grey canvas. The minimalism of the composition’s austere geometry and monochromatic tonality is interrupted by bright red line segment centered on the painting’s left edge. The painting’s resonance can be found in these syncopated placements, the slight variation of texture in the canvas and acoustic panel, and the color gradients – deep black over almost-black and the vibrant crimson line that, when the painting is displayed on a white wall, casts a halo-like shadow of its hue onto that surface.

The acoustic panels and architectural felt that comprise the structures and substrates of Nocturne 1 & 2 (2022) shape the aural as well as visual experiences of their audience, while their evident materiality also invites a tactile response. The diptych’s title alludes to both musical compositions that evoke nighttime and the art historical tradition of paintings of landscapes at night. In Nocturne 1, Jones superimposed two rectangular layers of grey architectural felt over a black acoustic panel atop a painted white canvas. Each layer projects successively forward, highlighting the substantial thickness of the sound-dampening textiles. Riffing on the orderly geometric structure established in the first panel, in Nocturne 2 Jones layered a diagonal strip of gray felt upon acoustic panel and architectural felt rectangles. On the top edge of both canvases, aligned with the dimensions of the black acoustic panel affixed to each of these, a painted red line appears to emanate a warm, red glow.

 Committed to abstraction, and working at the intersection of minimalism and conceptualism, Jones is heir to the lineage of twentieth-century modernism that encompasses visual art and music. Her work proposes new possibilities for multi-sensory experiences of art in its multiple forms, while her reframing of the narratives of American abstraction and avant-garde music invites us to attend to the correspondences and the silences within these narratives.

Melanie Anne Herzog