The Met to Present a New Installation by Artist Jennie C. Jones for the 2025 Roof Garden Commission

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 will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities.

The exhibition is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.

“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.

About the Artist

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.

Credits and Related Information

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 Rosati as well as an interview between Jones and artist Glenn Ligon. The publication will be available for purchase at The Met Store.

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

Related education programs will be posted on The Met website as they become available.

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 Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble will be featured
on The Met’s website, as well as on social media via the hashtags #CantorRoof and #MetJennieCJones.

About Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met

The Met’s engagement with art from 1890 to the present spans movements in modernism to contemporary practices from around the world, and is represented across numerous curatorial departments. To house this renowned collection of 20th- and 21st-century art, the Museum is undergoing a full reimagining of the current modern and contemporary art galleries, to be renamed the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing. Designed by architect Frida Escobedo, the first woman to design a wing in the Museum’s 154-year history, the 126,000-square-foot, five-story wing will provide more than 70,000 square feet for the display of art and include approximately 18,500 square feet of outdoor space spread across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces. Set to open in 2030, the wing will seamlessly connect with the rest of the Museum while also addressing accessibility, infrastructure, and sustainability needs. More information is available on The Met’s website.

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