Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) is well known for her embrace of music and sound in her practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and audio recordings. So naturally, for her rooftop commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she’s actually built her own musical instruments, fabricating three monumental stringed instruments. Tantalizingly, visitors are asked not to touch the Aeolian harp, zither, and one-string, letting them be activated instead by the breeze.
“You have this very precise settings of objects, almost in an orchestra,” Met director Max Hollein told me.
The sculptures are angular, with a deep red powered aluminum coating and concrete panels meant to match the color of the travertine in the Met’s soaring Great Hall. The wind did not oblige during the press preview for the exhibition, leaving their sonic qualities a mystery.
Jones compared the work’s latent musical potential to Walter De Maria’s (1935–2013) New Mexico Land Art masterpiece in the exhibition catalogue, saying the untouchable instruments “open up a space for anticipation, for failure, for waiting, for impatience.”
Jennie C. Jones, (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
But she was also responding to the objects in the Met’s musical instrument collection, which features 5,000 examples from six continents and the Pacific islands.
“These works that are behind glass that you can only imagine what they sound like,” Jones told me. “That was an important thing to carry over.”
The project’s scale presented a major challenge for the artist, who previously built a 16-foot-tall powder-coated aluminum and wood harp titled for the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., in 2020. (The Met project is just Jones’s second outdoor sculpture installation.)
Jennie C. Jones, (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“There’s no precedent,” Jones said. “There’s not a lot of ways to know where there is potential for failure.”
The only musical sculpture on a monumental scale that she could find was a storied 27-foot-tall wind harp built by art student Ward McCain in Vermont in 1972. (It was recently reconstructed on a farm in New Hampshire.)
But Jones dove deeper into musical history as she researched the project, drawing not only on the Met’s own collection of musical instruments, but also African American music and instrument making. Jones sees a through line between handcrafted instruments made by Black folk musicians and instrument makers, like the one-stringed diddley bow, and the hallmarks of Minimalism.
Jennie C. Jones, (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Her rooftop installation features a simplicity of line and form that works within the legacy of abstract sculpture, while being inspired by the musical lineage of people like Moses Williams and Louis Dotson, both Black musicians from Mississippi who made their own one-string instruments.
“She has a deep investment in history,” David Breslin, the Met’s curator of modern and contemporary art, told me. “She wanted to be in the Modern and contemporary galleries, and the musical instrument galleries, and to think with the architecture to come up with something new, but of her own language.”
Jennie C. Jones, (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The architecture of the Met is a quiet undertone in the installation, with the fourth sculpture—a long, thin, red triangle along the garden wall—marking the footprint of the museum’s Modern and contemporary wing. Jones’s installation will actually be the last rooftop commission before the wing is torn down and rebuilt, a long-delayed project first announced in 2014. (It is being helmed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo with a projected 2030 opening date.)
The Met rooftop commission is of course a beloved summer tradition, which transforms the space not only into a breezy outdoor art gallery, but a popular cocktail bar and live music venue that will be sorely missed during construction. (Forget about trying to go on the museum’s self-proclaimed Friday and Saturday “Date Nights,” unless you are game to wait in a long line just to get up there.)
Jennie C. Jones, (2025), for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The museum doesn’t have any live events with Jones’s instruments planned, but the artist has already enlisted two musicians to try their hand on her sculptural pieces. Ahead of the opening, Jones filmed a performance on the rooftop with bassist Luke Stewart and cellist Tamika Reed.
“They really went for it. They bought bows and mallets,” she said. “They had a really good time!”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
