On a brisk morning a few weeks ago on the roof terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artist Jennie C. Jones was previewing “Ensemble,” her suite of elegant, angular sculptural works for the museum’s annual Roof Garden commission, which opens on Tuesday.
Three sculptures glistened in the sunlight, each produced according to a precise geometric design. One was a trapezoid resting on one of its sides, a notched groove bisecting its face. Nearby was a large angled structure with a vertical aperture that stood roughly twice human height. The third work included two tapered panels, tilting askew to form a small “V.” Across each sculpture stretched a set of taut strings, fastened by piano pegs — seven on one piece, five on another, one on each side of the third.
The materials were clean: powder-coated aluminum and concrete travertine, the latter inspired by the Met’s own architecture. The palette was equally concise — two shades of red, the main surfaces wine-dark, accents in a scarlet hue. A fourth piece, in the brighter tone, stretched flat along two edges of the garden’s perimeter like a carpet runner, as if to demarcate the stage.
It was the first time back on the roof for Jones since installing the works, so when a light breeze moved across one of the sculptures at a certain angle, causing its strings to emit a rich audible hum, she savored the effect.
“I’m thrilled!” Jones said. The sound hovered, overriding the ambient city noises, until the wind shifted, leaving a gently dissipating resonance. “Wow,” she said. “She’s performing. It works. Right on cue.”
Jones, 56, has long incorporated sound in her art — if not always audibly, then conceptually. Her drawings, sculpture and paintings frequently employ materials and motifs that suggest a sonic presence, like audio cables and CD jewel cases in her early work, or acoustic panels, of the kind used in recording studios, in her ongoing series of hybrid paintings.
She also makes sound works that collage samples from Black classical or avant-garde music or explore drone-like vibrations. These site-specific tracks have filled spaces including at a Confederate memorial hall in New Orleans, Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., and the upper floors of the Guggenheim Museum, as part of her major 2022 survey exhibition there.
On the Met roof, she is deploying another tactic: sculptures as potential musical instruments. Their forms draw equally on the abstractionist canon and on Black artistic breakthroughs that this canon has typically ignored or excluded. They draw connections between Minimalist greats like Ronald Bladen or Tony Smith (whose work once appeared on this roof) and improvised instruments made by Black rural musicians. (To some, they may also recall the 1960s sonic sculptures of the artist and designer Harry Bertoia.)
Jones’s sculptures are not meant to be played. Instead, how Met visitors experience them will vary with time and weather. Intense daylight will deepen their claret color to a brooding brown-black. As for the strings — when and if they activate depends on the wind. Jones embraces this indeterminacy. “A big part of the project is about anticipation and silence, activation and happenstance,” she said. “All these variables that are out of our hands.”
The Met debuted the Roof Garden commission in 2013; artists have used the opportunity in myriad ways. Last year, for instance, Petrit Halilaj built airy metal forms based on doodles he found in schoolrooms in the Balkans, an indirect record of childhood in conflict. In 2023, Lauren Halsey created a monumental work joining references to Egyptian architecture and symbols and signage of South Los Angeles, destined for the sculpture park she is designing there.
For Jones, the first task was to “grapple with the site,” she said. The need to interact with the Manhattan skyline was fairly obvious, she added. The more interesting challenge was addressing the museum itself. “It’s a complicated space,” she said, “because it’s not visually or physically tied to a piece of architecture so much as it’s resting upon 5,000 years of art.”
The Roof Garden artists can explore the Met’s storied collection and draw from it — or critique the way it tells art history. Jones visited the musical instrument rooms, studying shapes of lutes and zithers.
But she decided that she had plenty to say in her own language. “I said: You know what? It’s not my responsibility to have an institutional critique at this moment. I’m going to hold the space with my work, and stay on the track of everything I’ve been talking about for 25 or 30 years.”
Raised in Cincinnati, Jones attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1980s, then earned her M.F.A. at Rutgers University. She was drawn to Minimalism while keenly aware of the racial and gender exclusions in what she was taught. At the same time, she was listening to experimental jazz and Black creative music as conceptually adventurous as John Cage or La Monte Young. She has claimed her space in Minimalism while defying its accepted narratives, with sound and sonic history as fertile ground for exploration.
“Sound is the underlying motif that ties the work together,” said Lauren Rosati, the Met’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art, who worked with Jones on “Ensemble.” She added: “Against a tide of artists working in Black figuration, she’s remained resolutely committed to abstraction.”
“Ensemble” has its precursor in an outdoor sculpture Jones installed at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., in 2020. Titled “These (Mournful) Shores,” it extended the granite wall on the grounds with the artist’s 16-foot sculpture of aluminum and wood, equipped with harp strings. The work was built as an Aeolian harp — an instrument played by the wind that is often associated with the Romantic era.
One component in “Ensemble” reprises this concept at smaller scale. The trapezoid form revisits a Jones work from 2013, “Bass Traps With False Tones,” with strings turning the sculpture into a stylized zither or dulcimer. As for the third work, the single string on each of its panels evokes the so-called diddley bow, a folk instrument often made from found objects. “This was the pièce de résistance for me, because it encapsulates a confluence of histories,” Jones said.
During her research, she became interested in Moses Williams, a Mississippi-born itinerant blues musician who made one-string instruments from wire and boards. Digging further, she found an archive photograph of a man’s hand plucking a string affixed to a wooden wall, with a rock lodged between the string and the planks. This, it turned out, was Louis Dotson, another Mississippian rural music-maker. In their manners of making — with straight lines, leaning planks and walls — she recognized classic Minimalist gestures.
“My origin story of Minimalism includes the ingenuity of these folks,” Jones said. “It comes from a place of depth and utility and the moment when you can take something from the floor and put it on the side of your house and people will gather and sing with you.” In designing “Ensemble,” she sought “a sparseness in vernacular, a way of holding space with simplicity, a way of having minimalism in form be emotive rather than cold.”
“Ensemble” is the final Roof Garden commission before that section of the building is demolished to make way for the new Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, to open in 2030, which will have an expanded garden one floor below. Jones’s wish, she said, is that her commission sets a tone for the museum’s next chapter. “I want these to say that the Met is pivoting, that we’re expanding our ideas around abstraction and Minimalism,” she said.
David Breslin, the Met’s curator in charge of modern and contemporary art, agreed. “I hope our work carries forward Jennie’s ethos of deep intellectual engagement told directly from the heart,” he said.
This fall, Jones will open an exhibition of new and existing work along with a new site-specific installation at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, while curating a concurrent exhibition there of work from the 1960s and 1970s by artists significant to her — Fred Eversley, Carmen Herrera, Agnes Martin, Martin Puryear, Mildred Thompson and more. And through the summer she is presenting two sound works in the historically charged space of the Confederate Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond.
At the Met, Jones said that she usually keeps her research private, letting the finished work speak for itself. But this time she was sharing more of the back story — perhaps because the lineages invoked in “Ensemble” are bursting to be heard.
“It’s hard not to talk about ancestors right now,” she said.
The breeze shifted; one of the sculptures began to hum. “And right on cue, there they are.”
The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble
April 15 — Oct. 19, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org. The Cantor Roof Garden will close in October and reopen in a new form in 2030, as part of the new Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art.
Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa and elsewhere. Previously he wrote regularly for The Village Voice and The Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.
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