We spoke to Jennie C. Jones about dodging the pressure to signify Blackness in her art, and finding her own language:
Jennie C. Jones at the Guggenheim Museum, 2022. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Photo: David Heald.With their muted palettes and modular configurations, Jones’s works harken back to the postwar abstractions of painters like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, who made a virtue of empty space, and pay homage to the Black musical avant-garde of the 1950s, such as free-jazz pioneers who turned strategic silence into a statement.
You often begin talks by showing a photo of John Coltrane at the Guggenheim. Given that your exhibition at the museum is the reason we’re speaking today, I thought that might be a good place for us to start. What does that photo mean to you and your practice? Throughout your career, it seems, you’ve often operated at odds with the prevailing trends of the day, embracing abstraction or minimalism, say, when portraiture was popular or Neo-expressionism was preferred by the market. Were you engaging with the ideas at the center of the culture wars when you were at SAIC? Or were you going against the grain even then?
Alma Thomas’s work spoke to me 30 years ago. Carmen Herrera, Howardena Pindell, Mavis Pusey is another one—the art world loves an old lady wheeling into her show when she’s finally at the Whitney. And it’s just heartbreaking. There are people that I think have been courageous and consistent and I can only hope that my foolish consistency was encouraged because of them. You’re not going to make any money, you’re not going to be popular. But my goal is not to be inand have a Ferrari.
Then I realized, ‘Well, this is kind of the work.’ It was kind of a live performance practice and [I started] making drawings that came out of that. Then came the idea of listening as a conceptual practice, which was something that I wrote in my notebook and it just stayed with me.I made my first sound piece around 1999.
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