Guggenheim Presents “Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics”

Jennie C. Jones, Fractured Extension/Broken Time, 2021 (detail).  Acoustic absorber panel, architectural felt, and acrylic on canvas in two parts, 121.9 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm each. © Jennie C. Jones, courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Opening on January 28, the exhibition will feature twenty new works from the artist created in response to the Guggenheim’s architecture.

Exhibition: Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics
Venue: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
Location: Rotunda Levels 1 and 2, Sixth Level
Dates: January 28–April 18, 2022

From January 28 through April 18, 2022, an exhibition of new and recent works by interdisciplinary artist Jennie C. Jones will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics will include paintings, works on paper, and a sound installation that responds to the Guggenheim’s iconic architecture by interweaving visual and aural experience.

Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics is organized by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Collections.

Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate architectural felt and acoustic panels to create what Jones calls “active surfaces.” These materials absorb and dampen sound, thus affecting the acoustic properties of their environments and impacting the viewers’ experiences, auditory and otherwise as they move through the exhibition. Protruding from the wall, the works are both a part of and apart from the architectural spaces they transform.

The pieces in the show comprise multiple components and take the form of diptychs and triptychs—arrangements that Jones compares to chords in music. The surfaces of these objects balance a contained Minimalist rigor with gestural painted marks. This interplay between traces of the artist’s hand and signs of its erasure suggests the tension between improvisation and controlled structure evident in avant-garde music. Jones channels in her hybrid objects a legacy of radical Black sonic practitioners who negotiated twentieth-century social experience with compositions that could be powerfully expressive in their embrace of opacity. Far more than “viewers,” visitors to the museum are encouraged to experience the social and physical dynamics of perception as they explore Jones’s works on the first two levels of the Guggenheim rotunda, as well as a sound installation on the sixth level.

Installed alongside Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics invites a surprising dialogue between the two artists for whom music is central to the composition of their respective works. The synesthetic experience of encountering Jones’s art mirrors Kandinsky’s own spiritual belief in art at the intersection of sight and sound.

Support for Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics is provided by The Macallan Scotch Whisky,

Ellen-Blair Chube, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Agnes Gund, Louise Jamail, Arthur Lewis and Hau Nguyen, the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, Marilyn and Larry Fields, Barbara and Bruce Berger, and Hannah Gottlieb-Graham.

Additional funding is provided by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s International Director’s Council and Young Collectors Council.

About the Artist

Jennie C. Jones lives and works in Hudson, New York. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1968, the artist received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991, an MFA from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1996 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1996. Jones has had solo exhibitions at The Arts Club of Chicago (2020); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2016); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2013); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2009), among others. Her work has been shown in recent group exhibitions, including Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans (2021); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York (2021); Ground/work, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020); Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2020); The Shape of Shape, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017); and The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015). Jones is the recipient of several residencies, grants, and fellowships, including the Rose Art Museum’s Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award (2017); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’s Rauschenberg Award (2016); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2013); The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2012); and William H. Johnson Prize (2008).

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. An architectural icon and “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is now among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about the museum and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

Visitor Information

Admission: Adults $25, students/seniors (65+) $18, members and children under 12 free. Visitors must book tickets in advance online. Open Thursdays through Mondays from 11 am to 6 pm. Pay What You Wish hours are Saturdays from 4 to 6 pm. Timed tickets are required and available at guggenheim.org/tickets. Explore the Guggenheim with our free Digital Guide, a part of the Bloomberg Connects app. Find it in the Apple App Store or in the Google Play Store.

The Guggenheim is implementing health and safety measures in consideration of visitors and employees and in compliance with New York State and City guidelines. Face masks will be mandatory inside the museum for anyone over the age of two. New requirements should be reviewed in advance of a visit; they are posted on COVID-19 Safety Measures: What to Expect When Visiting.