This spring, the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t just offer sweeping views of Central Park—it hums, vibrates, and whispers, thanks to Ensemble, a new installation by artist Jennie C. Jones. With a background in visual abstraction and a deep, ongoing dialogue with sound, Jones has transformed the museum’s Roof Garden into a space where sculpture and atmosphere collaborate—sometimes quietly, sometimes audibly.
Born in Cincinnati in 1968, Jones is no stranger to blending disciplines. Her practice has long lived in the space between what is seen and what is heard, what is present and what’s historically been left out. With Ensemble, her second-ever outdoor work, she brings a quiet kind of radicalism to one of New York’s most visible cultural platforms.
The installation—geometric forms crafted from powder-coated aluminum and a concrete travertine that nods to the Met’s architecture—draws on the physical language of musical instruments. Think strings and woodwinds, but abstracted, distilled into lines, curves, and tension. Taut strings, fastened with piano tuning pegs, capable of producing soft harmonic tones when stirred by a gust of wind, are stretched across the structures. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the sculptures play back.
There’s no performance schedule. No predictable crescendo. The sounds emerge–or don’t–depending on the whims of the weather, turning each visit into something uniquely ephemeral. The result is a meditative experience that asks for patience and presence, qualities not often demanded in a city that thrives on speed.
Photo © Terry W. Sanders
Jones’s decision to use sound as both material and metaphor is hardly incidental. Over the years, she’s worked with everything from acoustic panels to audio cables, folding the language of music into visual art while simultaneously interrogating the silences of art history, particularly its erasures and exclusions. Minimalism, often celebrated for its austerity and formal rigor, has rarely made space for artists like Jones. With Ensemble, she reclaims that space—not with noise, but with resonance.
The installation arrives as the museum prepares to pause its beloved Roof Garden commissions until 2030, when the new Tang Wing dedicated to modern and contemporary art will open. In this context, Ensemble feels like both a punctuation mark and a prelude: a quiet but firm assertion that abstraction can be political, that minimalism can carry memory, and that art can ask us to listen more closely.
On view from April 14 through October 19, Ensemble doesn’t demand attention—it rewards it. It’s not about spectacle, but attunement. And in Jones’s hands, even silence has a sound.
