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Square Text box with a gray background. White bold text is in the top left corner that read The Roof Garden Commission following by pink text that reads Jennie C Jones
Exhibition

The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble

Gallery Closure

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden will be closed Monday, April 21 and Tuesday, April 22.

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.

The exhibition is supported by

Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky, and Melony and Adam Lewis.

The catalogue is made possible by the Mary and Louis S. Myers Foundation Endowment Fund and the Mellon Foundation.

Installation view of Ensemble, 2025, by Jennie C. Jones. Powder coated aluminum, stainless steel strings, instrument pins and concrete cast travertine tiles. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2025 Jennie C. Jones