This fall the Pulitzer Arts Foundation explores the art of the multi-disciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) in an illuminating juxtaposition of exhibitions: one, of Jones’s new and recent work; the other, organized by the artist herself, comprising art by artists who have been touchstones throughout her career.
A Line When Broken Begins Again features a major site-specific commission alongside a selection of paintings, sound works, and collages. Other Octaves: Curated by Jennie C. Jones presents 34 works of art by a loose network of artists who have inspired Jones throughout her career. A good number—like Mildred Thompson, Ben Patterson, and Mavis Pusey—are still little-known today.
Jennie C. Jones is internationally recognized for developing a body of work that calls attention to relationships between painting, sound, and space. In so doing, she has drawn on the legacy of modernism and minimalism in the visual arts to help ground viewers in the auditory present while transporting them into the history of music, especially that of the Black avant-garde.
“To anyone versed in the history of modern art, Jennie’s abstract paintings will look familiar. But they’re actually radical experiments into bridging a gap in cultural history, one that separates avant-garde visual art from music. We at the Pulitzer are committed to questioning art historical boundaries and so leaped at the opportunity to organize this set of exhibitions,” says Cara Starke, Executive Director, Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
“Jennie presents her first freestanding sculpture for an interior space in A Line When Broken Begins Again,” notes Stephanie Weissberg, Senior Curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, who has organized the exhibition with Heather Alexis Smith, Assistant Curator.
Weissberg continues, “In so doing, she extends her career-long investigation into how the very materiality of visual art can be made to enhance a viewer’s consciousness of sound—and, thus, their place in the present. Point of Perspective takes this project even further into the realm of an enveloping space and shifting movement.”
For her part, Jones recalls that, “My aha moment was to thread painting, architecture, and acoustics together, to bring my poetic and heartachy love of music history together with the narrative of how American modernism was constructed.”
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