The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jennie C. Jones's solo exhibition Ensemble at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

The institution's press release follows:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newest Roof Garden Commission is on view April 15 through October 19, 2025, and features a dynamic work by artist Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio). Titled Ensemble, the site-responsive installation is composed of three large sculptural forms based on string instruments—a trapezoidal zither; a tall Aeolian harp; and a doubled, leaning one-string—corralled on two sides by a floor piece that serves as both a “conductor” of the ensemble and a boundary-marker of the stage-like surface on which it sits. Full of sonic potential, the sculptures sit quietly in place, waiting to be heard. The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble is the 12th in the series of commissions for the outdoor space.

The exhibition is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky, and Melony and Adam Lewis.

“We are thrilled that Jennie C. Jones has brought her unique artistic vision to The Met’s iconic roof garden,” said Max Hollein, the Museum’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Elevated high above the sounds and rhythms of New York City, her innovative installation seamlessly combines form, color, line, and acoustics, challenging visitors to engage with sculpture in new and unexpected ways.”

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, added, “Jennie C. Jones’s fidelity to abstraction invites her viewers to pay attention to the quieter pathways where profound meanings reside. By combining the sensorial experiences of visual art and sound, Jones is one of the most thoughtful and compelling voices in contemporary art today."

For Ensemble, Jones drew inspiration from the Roof Garden location and The Met itself. The sculptures’ powder-coated aluminum surfaces—featuring a deep red palette with instances of bright red color along edges or in sound holes—are juxtaposed with concrete blocks resembling travertine, a material found in the Museum’s Great Hall and throughout its buildings. The mechanics of the sculptures, from the angles of the strings to the location of the tuning hardware, were partially informed by observations of the stringed instruments in The Met’s Musical Instruments galleries.

For the form based loosely on a zither—typically a flat instrument with strings equal to the length of the sound board—Jones created a reclining trapezoid with a slanted face, a hollow center, and strings lining the back. The sculpture is formally based on the shape of a sound absorber used in one of her previous works, Bass Traps with False Tones (2013).

The artist’s Aeolian harp draws on her one previous work of outdoor sculpture, These (Mournful) Shores (2020), an instrument conceived for the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and built into the architecture of the museum. Intended to be played by the wind, Aeolian harps are fretless and do not require performers. Jones’s enlarged, freestanding Aeolian harp appears monumental in form but requires a close encounter to be heard.

For the third sculpture, modeled after the one-string, Jones looked to the Mississippi-born musicians Moses Williams and Louis Dotson, who performed a unique style of blues music on the instrument, which is typically constructed from humble materials. Williams and Dotson leaned the instrument upright against a wall or a tree; Jones pays homage to these two musicians by repeating the leaning sound bar in her take on the one-string.

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences. It stands as the final Roof Garden Commission before the space temporarily closes in preparation for the construction of the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, The Met’s new home for its collection of modern and contemporary art. The series will resume following the anticipated 2030 reopening of the renovated wing, which will feature an expanded Cantor Roof Garden on the fourth floor.

About the Artist

In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jennie C. Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas that absorb sound to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

Her solo exhibitions include Jennie C. Jones: Compilation, at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015–16); Jennie C. Jones: RPM, at the Glass House (2018); Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure, at the Arts Club Chicago (2020); Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2022); and the forthcoming Jennie C. Jones: A Line When Broken Begins Again at the Pulitzer Foundation (2025). Jones’s work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. She lives and works in Hudson, New York.