On a lively morning a few weeks ago, on the rooftop terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, artist Jenny C. Jones was previewing the “Ensemble,” a suite of elegant, angular sculptures for the museum's annual roof garden committee, which will open Tuesday.
Three sculptures glowed under sunlight, each produced according to an accurate geometric design. One was a trapezoidal placed on one of its sides, with a groove in a notch bisecting its face. Nearby was a large angled structure with a vertical opening that stood about twice as tall as the human height. The third piece includes two tapered panels, tilting to form a small “V”. A set of tense strings stretched out, secured with piano pegs throughout each sculpture.
The material was clean: powder coated aluminum and concrete travertine, the latter inspired by Met's own architecture. The palette was equally concise. Two shades of red, accents with main surface winding darkness and scar color. The fourth piece, in a bright tone, stretched flat like a carpet runner along the two edges of the garden boundary.
It was the first time she had returned to Jones' roof since she had installed the piece, so she tasted the effect when a light breeze traveled across one of the sculptures at a certain angle, and its strings emitted a rich audible ham.
“I'm excited!” Jones said. The sound hovered, neutralising the ambient city noise, leaving a gentle dissipating resonance until the wind shifted. “Wow,” she said. “She's playing. It works. Just in the queue.”
Jones, 56, has long incorporated sound into her art. Her drawings, sculptures and paintings frequently use materials and motifs that suggest the presence of sounds, such as early works and acoustic panels, as well as early as they are used in her ongoing hybrid paintings used in recording studios.
She also creates sound works that explore vibrations like black classical or avant-garde music samples and drones. These site-specific tracks fill spaces as part of a major 2022 research exhibition, including Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans, the Glass House at Philip Johnson in New Canaan, Connecticut, and the upper floors of the Guggenheim Museum.
In Metroof, she develops another tactic: sculpture as a potential instrument. Their forms are equally drawn to the abstractist Canon and the artistic breakthroughs of blacks that this canon normally ignored or excluded. They portray the connection between minimalist greats like Ronald Braden and Tony Smith (where this piece once appeared on this roof) and improvised instruments made by black country musicians. (For some, they may also recall artist and designer Harry Bertoia's 1960s sound sculpture.)
Jones's sculptures are not intended to be played. Instead, how visitors experience it depends on the time and weather. The intense daylight deepens the claret color into a gloomy brown black. For strings, when and when to activate them depends on the wind. Jones accepts this uncertainty. “The majority of the project is about predictions and silence, revitalization and events,” she said. “All these variables are out of our hands.”
Met made its debut in the Roof Garden Committee in 2013. Artists take advantage of this opportunity in countless ways. For example, last year, Petrit Khalirazi created a well-ventilated metal mold based on graffiti he found in the Balkan schoolroom, an indirect record of childhood in conflict. In 2023, Lauren Halsey created a monumental piece that took part in Egyptian architecture and references to symbols and signs of South Los Angeles.
For Jones, her first job was to “work on the site,” she said. The need to interact with the Manhattan skyline was pretty obvious, she added. A more interesting challenge was to tackle the museum itself. “It's a complex space,” she said, “it's because it's not as visually or physically connected to architecture as it remains in five,000 years of art.”
Roof Garden artists can explore and draw from Met's prestigious collections. Jones visited the instrument room and studied the root and jizzer shape.
But she decided that she had a lot to say in her language. “I said: What do you know? It's not my responsibility to make institutional criticism at this point. I'll keep the space in my work and stay on all the trajectories I've discussed for 25 or 30 years.”
Growing up in Cincinnati, Jones attended the Chicago Art Institute in the late 1980s and later won an MFA at Rutgers University. She was drawn to minimalism and was keenly aware of racial and gender exclusion in her teaching. At the same time, she listened to experimental jazz and black creative music, just like John Cage and La Monte Young. She claimed her space in minimalism, defiing the accepted narrative and ignoring sound and Sonic's history as a fertile basis for exploration.
“Sound is the underlying motif that brings together the work,” said Lauren Rosaty, a quasi-curator of Mets in Modern and Contemporary Art, who collaborated with Jones on the Ensemble. She added: “At the tide of artists working in the formation of black people, she remained determinedly committed to abstraction.”
The “Ensemble” features the predecessor of the outdoor sculpture Jones, which was installed in 2020 at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The title “These (Sad) Coasts” stretched out the granite walls with 16-foot sculptures of aluminum and wood from the artist with harp strings. The work was constructed as an Eurian Harp. This is an instrument played by winds, often associated with romantic times.
One component of the “ensemble” reproduces this concept on a small scale. The trapezoidal shape revisits Jones' work, “Base Trap in False Tones” since 2013, transforming the strings into sculptures into stylized Zither or Dulcimer. For the third task, a single string in each panel evokes the so-called Diddley Bow, a folk instrument made from frequently discovered objects. “This was Paisse de Resistance for me, because it encapsulates the confluence of history,” Jones said.
In her research, she became interested in Mississippi-born blues musician Moses Williams, making one-string instruments from wires and boards. Drilling further, she finds an archival photograph of the man's hands, picks strings stuck on wooden walls, surrounded by rocks between the strings and slabs. This turned out to be Louis Dotson, another rural music manufacturer in Mississippi. With her manners made with straight lines, tilted planks and walls, she recognized the classic minimalist gestures.
“The minimalist narrative of my origins contains the ingenuity of these people,” Jones said. “It comes from a place of depth and practicality, and you can take something from the floor and place it next to the house, and people can gather and sing with you.” When designing the “ensemble,” she sought “a way to hold a space with sparse slang, simplicity, how to make minimalism of shapes emotional rather than cold.”
The “ensemble” is the final roof garden committee before the building's sections are demolished, allowing paths to be made to create new Tang wings for modern and contemporary art, opening in 2030. Jones' wish is that her committee is setting the tone for the next chapter of the museum. “I want them to say that Met is a pivot and expands its ideas about abstraction and minimalism,” she said.
David Breslin, Met curator for contemporary and contemporary art, agreed. “I hope that our work will advance Jenny's spirit of deep intellectual engagement spoken directly from the heart,” he said.
This fall, Jones will hold an exhibition of new existing works alongside a new site-specific installation at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, curating simultaneous displays of works by artists of her 1960s and 1970s. And over the summer she presents two sound pieces in the historically recharged space of the Confederate Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Art in Richmond.
At the Met, Jones usually says that she keeps her research private and lets the finished work speak for itself. But this time, she shared many of the backstory. Probably because you can hear the lineage that was called in the “ensemble.”
“It's hard not to talk about your ancestors right now,” she said.
The breeze has changed. One of the sculptures began to become ham. “And exactly in the queue, they're there.”
Roof Garden Committee: Jenny C. Jones, Ensemble
April 15th – October 19th, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org. Cantor Roof Garden will close in October and reopen in 2030 in a new form. This is part of the new Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art.
