What sound does a sculpture make? That is one of the many synesthetic questions the artist Jennie C. Jones conjures in her new commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden, Ensemble (until 19 October). The monolithic, site-responsive installation uses stringed instruments as experiential analogs for Black contributions to the cultural canon, expanding the Hudson Valley-based artist's longstanding interest in animating minimalist abstraction with sonic life.
Simultaneously melding with and disrupting views of the New York City skyline of their immediate environs, Jones's stark, powder-coated aluminium menhirs combine line and acoustics, complicating the quiet, waiting didacticism of conventional outdoor monuments. Based on the formal elements of a zither, a harp and a Blues-inspired one-string, each expectant note of Ensemble coalesces into a layered sensorial tome, inviting viewers into a contemplative, ever-shifting psychic space.
The Met rooftop installation is only Jones's second large-scale outdoor project. These (Mournful) Shores, a 2020 creation originally designed for the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, uses the seascapes of Winslow Homer as a portal to the Middle Passage, the route enslaved people endured on their journey from Africa to the "New World" across the Atlantic Ocean. The Aeolian harp-inspired work featured in Ensemble draws on the poetic precedent of These (Mournful) Shores; Aeolian harps, by definition, are played by the wind and don't require musicians to be activated. Visitors must get in close to the sculpture to hear what it has to say.
Jones, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, has spent her three-decade career exploring the historically under-sung outposts of modernism, deploying sound elements and the act of listening as central tenets of her practice. Taking on the mantle of the Black avant-garde, Jones centres diasporic subjectivity through a material lens, evoking musical notation, specifically jazz, through paintings, sculptures, works on paper and audio compositions. Her past exhibitions include solo shows at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (in 2015-16), the Arts Club Chicago (2020) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2022). Next month at Frieze New York she will be showing new works on Alexander Gray Associates' stand. In September the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis will open the solo exhibition Jennie C. Jones: A Line When Broken Begins Again (5 September-1 February 2026).
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