Artist Jennie C. Jones: On Art and Resonance

Join artist Jennie C. Jones and Hirshhorn curator Anne Reeve to explore how sound can be made visible and how histories can be embedded into seemingly simple forms.

In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, sound, and installation, Jones’ interdisciplinary work often engages multiple senses. She draws on unconventional materials to give visual expression to sound and to consider the unexplored intersections of abstract visual artists and black avant-garde sonic practitioners.

She is both inspired by and stretches the limits of the graphic forms of musical notations and the principles of Minimalism, an art form characterized by a simplicity of objects and forms. For her acoustic paintings, as she calls them, she uses commercial acoustic panels and architectural felts that are typically used to minimize echoes and reverberations and slightly alters the surfaces with paint, complicating the otherwise spare and unmodulated fabric.

Jones’ Light Gray with Middle C (variation #2) and Higher Resonance are on view in Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection at the Museum through Fall 2023.