For the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) has produced Ensemble. Only her second outdoor sculptural installation, the project explores the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In the artist's unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous.
In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.
