Jennie C. JonesConstant Structure

Lingering at the intersection of music theory, painting, and sound, Jennie C. Jones presents a new body of work prompted by the concept of “constant structure”—a term borrowed from Modern jazz composition. It refers to a consecutive chord progression with different root notes that links disparate tones into a cohesive entity. Like the intervals of jazz then, Jones’s new acoustic panel paintings, works on paper, and site-specific gestures hit moments of dissonance and harmony through serial repetition and variation. Jones has made her mark since the 1990s by bringing the specifics of African American music history to bear upon the legacy of geometric abstraction and minimalist form. The works included here depart from the characteristic muted gray palette of the last decade, and instead draw upon a range of hues made available by a specialty acoustic textile manufacturer. Working with a set of given materials and colors, Jones frees her forms to address poetic ideas about a personal version of synesthesia—the melding of vision and hearing.

Catalogues from the exhibition can be purchased in the Arts Club of Chicago online shop.

Jennie C. Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1968, and currently lives and works in Hudson, New York. She attended Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts where she received her Master of Fine Art degree in 1996. Prior to that she attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1991 with Fellowship, as well as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1996. She is a Bard College MFA faculty member and a recent critic at the Yale School of Art (2015-18). Among her numerous awards, Jones was a recipient of the 2016 Robert Rauschenberg Award presented by the Foundation for Contemporary Art, The Joan Mitchell Award in 2013, and The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize in 2012. Recent projects include RPM (revolutions per minute) at The Glass House in New Cannon, Connecticut, and her first solo show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago. Jones’s work has been exhibited at major national and international art institutions including solo presentations at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco (2011); The Kitchen in New York (2011); and Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2013). Compilation, a 10-year survey exhibition of her work, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, was on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She has works in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.