The Roof Garden Commission:
Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
April 15 - October 19, 2025
The Roof Garden Commission series was established in 2013 by The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The series of site-specific commissions on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden has featured work by Imran Qureshi (2013), Dan Graham (2014), Pierre Huyghe (2015), Cornelia Parker (2016), Adrián Villar Rojas (2017), Huma Bhabha (2018), Alicja Kwade (2019), Héctor Zamora (2020), Alex Da Corte (2021), Lauren Halsey (2023), and Petrit Halilaj (2024).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has commissioned Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) to create a new installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. On view from April 15 through October 19, 2025, The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble explores the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities.
“We are thrilled that Jennie C. Jones will bring her unique artistic vision to The Met’s iconic roof garden,” said Max Hollein, the Museum’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Elevated high above the sounds and rhythms of New York City, her innovative installation will seamlessly combine form, color, line, and acoustics, challenging visitors to engage with sculpture in new and unexpected ways.”David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, added, “Jennie C. Jones’s fidelity to abstraction invites her viewers to pay attention to the quieter pathways where profound meanings reside. By combining the sensorial experiences of visual art and sound, Jones is one of the most thoughtful and compelling voices in contemporary art today."
This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences. It stands as the final Roof Garden Commission before the space temporarily closes in preparation for the construction of the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, The Met’s new home for its collection of modern and contemporary art. The series will resume following the anticipated 2030 reopening of the renovated wing, which will feature an expanded Cantor Roof Garden on the fourth floor.
JENNIE C. JONES
In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jennie C. Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas that absorb sound 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.
Her solo exhibitions include Jennie C. Jones: Compilation, at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015–16); Jennie C. Jones: RPM, at the Glass House (2018); Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure, at the Arts Club Chicago (2020); and, most recently, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2022). Jones’s work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. She lives and works in Hudson, New York.
The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble is conceived by the artist in consultation with Lauren Rosati, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and Research Projects Manager in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Met.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that includes an essay by Lauren Rosati as well as an interview between Jones and artist Glenn Ligon.
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
