Interviews, Issue 9

Jennie C. Jones

Listening as a Conceptual Practice

Words STEPHANIE WEISSBERG

Photography WILLIAM JESS LAIRD

Jennie C. Jones makes rigorous abstract paintings, installations, and sculptures that engage with histories of the avant-garde in visual art and music, including minimalism, conceptualism, and Black experimental sonic traditions. Her highly distilled visual vernacular consists of crisp geometric lines, an exacting use of color, and meticulously rendered surfaces. Jones’s signature acoustic paintings integrate architectural felt and acoustic panels to modify the sonic properties of their surrounding environment, thereby bringing heightened attention to viewers’ physical perception. I sat down with Jones at an exciting juncture. When we spoke, Jones had recently opened her sculptural installation, Ensemble, for the Met’s Roof Garden Commission, and we were working toward two exhibitions at the Pulitzer — one of her own work titled “A Line When Broken Begins Again” and one curated by her titled “Other Octaves.”

STEPHANIE WEISSBERG: What kinds of musicians were you exposed to growing up?

JENNIE C. JONES: As a kid in the 70s, we had a very broad range of music in the house. My mother bought a piano, which I think she enjoyed more than those of us who actually tried — or didn’t try — to take piano lessons. I always say, “I quit every instrument,” because I would rather have been making drawings. We had records that ranged from jazz and classical to folk music, reflecting the period, like Cat Stevens and Richie Havens. By high school, this smashed up against punk, mostly British and a little goth; Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, The Cure. I think the thread that ran through all of it was this energy outside of the norm — a sense of radicality or tenacity that carried across all those different forms of music.

SW: You’ve spoken about listening to music in the studio as being important to the development of your paintings. I’m also curious about the role silence plays in your process.

JCJ: Early on, I realized how much time I was spending curating the music I listened to in the studio. Curating the music itself became a quiet, meditative, performative act. This was long before playlists and algorithms, so there was real thoughtfulness in going through CDs, tapes, and records — the physical material of how we listened — and queuing things up. Sometimes I would queue up music, and no “sister muse” would arrive. There’s value in that — in being contemplative. That realization opened up a way of thinking about myself as a conceptual artist, where listening itself became part of the concept. About fifteen years ago, I wrote in a notebook: “listening as a conceptual practice.” That phrase shaped how I started thinking about materials and sound, and that idea has evolved over the last 25 years.

SW: Listening was less instantaneous 25 years ago — creating a playlist was more of an active choice you had to spend time on, compared to the breakneck speed at which we consume information now.

JCJ: It’s interesting you use the word “breakneck,” because the first time I really heard it was in reference to early modern music, which later became known as bebop or hard bop. They would talk about breakneck tempos, breakneck speeds. It became a thing, especially with someone like Charlie Parker, who wanted to play at speeds he felt white musicians couldn’t replicate or take from him. Part of it was that rapid-fire improvisation, that ingenuity, that inventiveness. I think if you invert that — slow it down — that’s where my work currently resides.

That slowness is something I’m considering again. I’m thinking about the power, the austerity, and the idea of standing and holding space. That slowness feels really important in this moment, in terms of what art can bring to the table when it’s not being consumed at the speed of everything else. We often quote Fred Moten, who put it so beautifully: “slow looking, listening.” Especially with minimalism, there are people who are drawn in — they sit, they contemplate, they get into the edges of things. But there’s also a massive number of people who walk by quickly, thinking, What is that? It’s a square. It’s just color. Being present allows for an unfold, internally.

SW: Your work is often associated with very bright, bold colors like reds and yellows, which you talk about in relation to sonic qualities. But a lot of your work also has more muted, quiet tones. Many of your paintings live in the gray family. Are there specific artworks or artists that have impacted the way you see the potential or the meaning of gray specifically?

JCJ: Jack Whitten wrote about the color gray, its power, and its ability to hold space. He said, “Gray has a way of evening the score.” For me, color has always been a very personal form of synesthesia, for lack of a better term. It’s not the kind where I see a number and think “green,” but there’s a tonal mood — a sonic quality — to color for me. The reds in particular have been present throughout my work. They move from the edges to the foreground and back again, acting almost like accents or marking sharp crescendos and decrescendos in a longer story.

Color is also a way of marking time. Our first conversation in the studio was about yellow, and that’s why I think I circled back. My exhibition “Higher Resonance” at the Hirshhorn in 2013 was about the shining light of my mom. It has taken time to come back to that, grief and gratitude. Color can mark moments in your life.

The grays, for instance, got warmer, then colder, and eventually evolved into a kind of putty color with a lavender undertone that spoke to Frank Lloyd Wright’s very specific “Wright white” used throughout the interior of the Guggenheim. With my show there in 2022, I wanted the paintings to feel like they were being gently pushed forward from the walls, like surfaces emerging from that color.