Jennie C. Jones: Ensemble

With its unparalleled views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, the Met’s rooftop terrace was hardly in need of a glow-up – but in 2013, the institution began inviting a different artist each year to create a site-specific installation for its roof garden, which has since borne plenty of fruit. There was Adrián Villar Rojas’s The Theatre of Disappearance, a spectral array of white dining tables and chairs accompanied by sculptural renderings of objects in the museum’s collection; Cornelia Parker’s nine-metre-high red barn, particularly unsettling in dusky light; and two sculptures by Huma Bhabha that told a stark story of power and prostration. Now it’s the turn of Jennie C. Jones, best known for combining minimalist aesthetics with a resourceful approach to sound. Though her practice largely comprises paintings and sound-based works, ‘Ensemble’, her second outdoor sculpture installation, plumbs the sonic and metaphorical possibilities of stringed instruments (15 April–19 October).

Find out more from the Met’s website.
Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary

Upward, Red Rest (2022), Jennie C. Jones. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; © Jennie C. Jones, 2025

Red Tone #8 (2024), Jennie C. Jones. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; © Jennie C. Jones, 2025

Nocturne, Earth Tone (2023), Jennie C. Jones. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; © Jennie C. Jones, 2025