Jennie C. Jones
b. 1968, Cincinnati
Lives in Hudson, New York
Venue
Ogden Museum Of Southern Art
925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday–Sunday, 10 AM–5 PM
Neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
High as the Listening Skies, 2021
Sound, 4 min., 45 sec.
The Edges of Heaven, Rest, 2021
Sound, 2 min., 58 sec.
For Prospect.5, Jennie C. Jones has created two sound works that play throughout the day and resound off the architecture of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Patrick F. Taylor Library. The first composition, High as the Listening Skies, features three choirs from Houston, Los Angeles, and Baltimore performing “A City Called Heaven.” The song was popularized by Mahalia Jackson, who was born in New Orleans in 1911 and is considered to be one of the most important gospel singers and Black liberation activists of her time. This song, while nondenominational, presents heaven as a Black utopia, and as something that is to be constantly strived for and sought after. The choirs are intentionally layered into an irregular harmony that strikes a moving balance of tenacity, repetition, joy, and chaos. The Edges of Heaven, the second piece, incorporates a tone associated with energetic healing to create a sound that evokes sensations that are both tender and somber. Jones layered the tone with samples from a composition by Alvin Singleton, a Black composer who is known for merging the worlds of jazz and symphony. In contrast to the exuberance of High as the Listening Skies, this track suggests an enduring calm.
With the sound emanating overhead, these pieces that remain beyond our grasp, centered on high and out of sight, evoking other worlds and spaces. They offer the transcendent possibilities of sound and music, creating a space for lingering pause and collective listening. These works invite reflection on Black histories and futures through a consideration of earthly and spiritual possibility.
Presented by the Ed Bradley Foundation.
about the artist
Jennie C. Jones sculpts, paints, and composes on the themes of African American history and jazz, in its broadest definition, within the frameworks of minimalism and abstraction. Her works represent sharp critiques of current political, cultural, and social conditions, such as her commentary on the lack of African American presence in the tradition of modernism. Jones’s works reveal the exchange between the physical properties of black sonic practices and the musical properties of visual abstraction. She has earned numerous accolades and awards, including the Robert Rauschenberg Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art (2016), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2013), and the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2012). Jones’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Jones earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1991) and an MFA from Rutgers University, New Jersey (1996). Jones also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and 2020 faculty at Yale Norfolk School of Art, Connecticut.
Jennie C. Jones, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans. Video: Jonathan Traviesa