By Abby Manishor
PITTSBURGH — The Heinz Family Foundation named artist and Cincinnati native Jennie C. Jones the recipient of the prestigious 29th Heinz Award for the Arts. As part of the accolade, Jones received an unrestricted cash award of $250,000.
Jennie C. Jones’ works of painting, sculpture and sound are influenced by minimalism and abstract art of the 20th century and by avant-garde music of the same era. Her work tells a more complete story of the cultural and social happenings of the time while also bringing past visual art movements into a contemporary context.
Her work is found in collections ranging from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Studio Museum in Harlem.
A lifelong music enthusiast, some of her early works focused on the bygone physicality of listening to music — opening an album or flipping a vinyl record over — by making sculptures of cables, album covers and cassette cases. Her works on paper played with visual elements of sheet music, and in 2000, she made her first sound piece. Through her innovative approach to object-making, she often paints on acoustic panels that direct sound toward the viewer.
At Jones’ first solo museum show, “Higher Resonance,” hosted in 2013 by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., her paintings of muted gray and fluorescent yellow were accompanied by a re-composition of music by Olly Wilson and Alice Coltrane, among others. Exhibition Curator Evelyn Hankins commented in Smithsonian Magazine, “When they’re in a gallery with no sound, they are these beautiful autonomous objects., but then you put sound in the gallery, they become activated.”
In 2011, she first exhibited “sound art” in tandem with visual art at The Kitchen in New York City, and in 2020, debuted at Alexander Gray Associates. For “These (Mournful) Shores,” her 2020 outdoor sculpture for the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, she fashioned a wind-activated harp at the end of a granite wall extending from the museum. Her vision was for the instrument to “sing to the permanent collection,” more specifically to two stormy seascapes by Winslow Homer that Jones read as portraits of the Middle Passage.
“Those who encounter my work will hopefully experience a need to pause and be inspired to investigate further — rewarded with close looking,” said Jones. “With or without a sonic element, it is my intention that these acoustic panel paintings create a hush in the spaces they occupy. I consider them to be always ‘working,’ active not passive. My artworks lean into the objecthood of painting with nuance and grace. In doing so, I hope to expand the viewers’ expectation and preconceived ideas about what Black cultural production looks and sounds like.”
“Dynamics,” Jones’ solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, opened in 2022 and marked the first solo presentation by a Black woman in the museum’s rotunda. The show included a sound installation that sent her subtle tones throughout the museum’s spiral. Like her acoustic panels’ ability to diffuse sound, the neon colors in her paintings appeared to produce their own light, reflecting their hue onto gallery walls.
In 2025, she will install an ensemble of instrumentalized sculptures on an exterior rooftop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she will continue to expand her use of acoustically active materials, paint and sound at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.
“We honor Jennie for her deeply contemplative, multidimensional compositions that reframe minimalism and engage us in experiences that are both visual and musical,” said Teresa Heinz, chairperson of the Heinz Family Foundation.
“Jennie’s work defies established genres, interlacing elements of sound, space, color and objects in ways that are profoundly moving. Her layered works are immersive, inviting us to reflect and ponder while experiencing moments of subtle beauty and meaning,” Heinz said. “The enduring impact of her compositions, together with the intellectual curiosity and artistic excellence she brings to her work are wonderful reflections of the spirit of The Heinz Awards.”