NEW YORK, NY.- From February 4 through May 2, 2022, an exhibition of new and recent works by interdisciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones are on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics includes paintings, works on paper, and a sound installation that responds to the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture by interweaving visual and aural experience.

Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics is organized by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Collections.




Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate architectural felt and acoustic panels to create what Jones calls “active surfaces.” These materials absorb and dampen sound, thus affecting the acoustic properties of their environments and impacting the viewers’ experience, auditory and otherwise as they move through the exhibition. Protruding from the wall, the works are both a part of and apart from the architectural spaces they transform.

The pieces in the show comprise multiple components and take the form of diptychs and triptychs—arrangements that Jones compares to chords in music. The surfaces of these objects balance a contained Minimalist rigor with gestural painted marks. This interplay between traces of the artist’s hand and signs of its erasure suggests the tension between improvisation and controlled structure evident in avant-garde music. Jones channels in her hybrid objects a legacy of radical Black sonic practitioners who negotiated twentieth-century social experience with compositions that could be powerfully expressive in their embrace of opacity. Far more than “viewers,” visitors to the museum are encouraged to experience the social and physical dynamics of perception as they explore Jones’s works on the first two levels of the Guggenheim rotunda, as well as a sound installation on the sixth level.

Installed alongside Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics invites a surprising dialogue between the two artists for whom music is central to the composition of their respective works. The synesthetic experience of encountering Jones’s art mirrors Kandinsky’s own spiritual belief in art at the intersection of sight and sound.

Jennie C. Jones lives and works in Hudson, New York. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1968, the artist received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991, an MFA from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1996 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1996. Jones has had solo exhibitions at The Arts Club of Chicago (2020); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2016); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2013); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), among others. Her work has been shown in recent group exhibitions, including Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); Ground/work, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020); Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2020); The Shape of Shape, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017); and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015). Jones is the recipient of several residencies, grants, and fellowships, including the Rose Art Museum’s Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award (2017); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s Rauschenberg Award (2016); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2013); The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2012); and William H. Johnson Prize (2008).