The Studio Museum in Harlem is awarding its Wein Prize, one of the most lucrative in contemporary art, to Jennie C. Jones, a 44-year-old Brooklyn-based painter and sculptor whose work - which she describes as “listening as a conceptual practice†- centers on music.
The prize, with a $50,000 award, has been given every year since 2006 to established or emerging African-American artists and was started by George Wein, a founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, in honor of his wife, Joyce Alexander Wein, a longtime trustee of the museum who died in 2005.
The prize, whose announcement was delayed by Hurricane Sandy, will be given at a museum gala on Feb. 4. Thelma Golden, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in an interview that Ms. Jones was chosen “not only to celebrate the rigor and strength of her practice, but also because of he thinking about what this amazingly generous prize could do for her at this point in her career.â€
Ms. Jones, who will have a solo exhibition in May at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, has been featured in several shows over the last decade at the Studio Museum and in Chelsea. Her work often uses the language of Minimalism to explore, and sometimes appropriate, avant-garde jazz and other modern music.
“I kept seeing these amazing parallels in ideologies for both disciplines, especially in jazz and abstraction,†Ms. Jones has said. “Conceptualism allows these different media to occupy the same space.â€
