This fall the Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents two illuminating exhibitions exploring the art of the multi-disciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968): one, of Jones’s new and recent work; the other, curated by the artist herself, featuring works by artists who have been touchstones throughout her career.
A Line When Broken Begins Again debuts a major site-specific commission alongside paintings, sound works, and collages. Other Octaves: Curated by Jennie C. Jones features 34 works by artists who have inspired Jones, including Mildred Thompson, Ben Patterson, and Mavis Pusey—figures still little-known today.
Jones is internationally recognized for developing a body of work that calls attention to relationships between painting, sound, and space. Drawing on modernism and minimalism, she grounds viewers in the auditory present while transporting them into the history of music, especially 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,” 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.”
Jones recalls, “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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