this must be the place to be: rod jones ii

rod

rod

this must be the place to be

must be the place to be

Mentored by Didier William Presented by CUE Art Foundation

manigoult

by Studio Ercan–Li

Ercan & Eric Li

About the Exhibition

this must be the place to be is a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist rod jones ii, with mentorship from Didier William. The exhibition presents new work that builds upon jones’s ongoing mixed-media practice, and that draws from his experiences growing up in his mother’s beauty salon. Using materials such as resourced fabric, synthetic hair, glass and acrylic beads, and dental floss, jones makes soft sculpture dolls he calls “homies” and constructs an installation — a world — that holds them.

“Why is it so difficult to call to mind representations of tenderness?” asks exhibition mentor Didier William. “As a child, jones bore witness to [a] meditative choreography of tenderness practiced and performed in real-time. He experienced a transformative liberation and joy offered by his mother’s tender care for Black beauty.” These formative memories of space imbued with intangible moments of intimacy and fulfillment — remain present in jones’s work in ways that feel both familiar and inaccessible at once. The “homies” are materially recognizable; made of common household and beauty supplies, they sit, stand, and are held by hands that cradle them from the walls. And yet, their forms and personhood are impossible to characterize. The space that jones has created is for them; as viewers, we are simply visitors in their universe.

In his first solo exhibition in a gallery space, it is clear that jones is invested in a different kind of placemaking, a kind that asks questions rather than proposing answers. What does it mean to make intentional space? How do we hold and how are we

held by the places we move through? Who are we in relation to what or who — surrounds us? What does it feel like to be accepted and to be present, to be embraced and to belong?

In this must be the place to be, jones conceives of what catalogue essayist Logan Cryer calls an “inverted realm.” Exemplifying a new genre of art practice that Cryer coins as “Black Queer Vernacular Craft,” he “plays with the humility embedded in entering an unfamiliar cultural space…jones’s experience of moving through belonging and unfamiliarity has led him to create an empathetic world of uncommon folk. His prolific practice is just at the start.”

rod jones ii

rod jones ii (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist from Gary, Indiana living and working in Philadelphia, PA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Printmaking fromTruman State University, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Art from the Pennsylvania Academy. He has shown work at InLiquid Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), Woodmere Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA),Truman State University (Kirksville, MO),Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia, PA) and Anna Zorina Gallery (NewYork, NY). His work has also been collected byThe Woodmere Museum of Art. He is currently an adjunct professor of Printmaking and Drawing at the University of Pennsylvania and Moore College of Art, and has lectured atTyler School of Art at Temple University, Pace University, William Paterson University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

i nevr felt my breath was enough nd ive nevr known why i dnt dream w/ my eyes closed bt ive always seen em who’s to say we’re not infinite? bcuz i been here before well, i wondered where our dreams kept goin and i kept watchin em get lost well, i nevr lost mine. i was nevr here to begin with. see me n dreams we made of the same stuff i wanna feel made of the same stuff dreams is i wanna feel like my gin glazed mouth did when i heard future was better than wayne like when i took the first bite of a black. diamond. watermelon. can dreams be kept in between fried oreo dough and a mound of powdered sugar? cn tht place be the moment i stare into my moon? cn tht place be in between bear hugs nd bananas? bcuz i be there like when i fell off my bike back at the apartment like when i get ice cream w/ dani like when i tried to lose myself in between my brothers at my first college party bt was found receiving the best twerk ive evr experienced bcuz i be there nd thts the place i wanna give back to because i be there inna freefall tht feels more like a bosom cushion tht feels more like bein grounded tht feels more like boundlessness tht feels more like nothingness. ion kno how i got here nd it dnt matter may these offerings be that sendin it up to u boi – unttld, rod jones ii

Mentor Statement

Didier William

I’ve followed rod jones’s work for some time now. Revisiting it in anticipation of this exhibition, I found myself reminded of how difficult it is to visualize tenderness. By this, I mean the kind of redemptive tenderness we might find in bell hooks’s articulations of love; a tenderness that is complex in origin, fraught, and fragile. Why is it so difficult to call to mind cultural and art historical representations of tenderness? Perhaps because collective historical memory often favors aggression or toughness, or maybe because cis-hetero capitalism privileges and masculinizes performative spectacles. In either case, visualizing tenderness doesn’t come easily.

We might have some idea what it’s supposed to feel like. We can approximate the physical movements and the choreography that constitute a tender engagement with one another and the world around us. But to give image and form to these gestures without falling prey to romantic tropes or trite generalizations is much harder. jones’s stitched and mended objects take direct aim at threading that needle, and he does so with thoughtful precision every time. His practice is one that I admire because he’s so good at making a place not just for things that need to be seen, but also for things that need to be held. In the tradition of Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Ross Gay, jones asks us to consider that full representation and honest legibility in this work hinges on holding his objects in real-time and committing to being present with them.

Before we even encounter his objects, though, it’s helpful to know that jones spent much of his adolescence growing up in a

beauty salon. His mother was a manicurist who owned the salon, and he and his brother spent innumerable hours passing the time at her feet as she clipped, polished, buffed, and painted her guests’ nails. Her hands moved with care, precision, radical autonomy, and confidence. As a child, jones bore witness to this meditative choreography of tenderness practiced and performed in real-time. He experienced a transformative liberation and joy offered by his mother’s tender care for Black beauty. While visiting his studio, his inheritance of these gestures isn’t lost on me. In his work, however, the bodies are invented; they are built from raw—almost amebic—material, and made into characters who are often as familiar and vulnerable as they are withholding and stoic.

When I first encountered jones’s new body of work, what immediately came to mind was the long history of dollmaking in black communities not only within the United States, but across the Black Atlantic. For many generations of Black people, dolls have served as an intergenerational container for expressions of joy, as well as for liberation, resistance, and healing. Often meticulous and detailed in their fabrication, they are entities born of labor and love that hold decades of cultural and familial history.

jones carries these histories forth as he simultaneously gives his dolls—or “homies,” as he calls them—an added layer of refusal. In the exhibition, they seem to turn away from us, sitting in repose, resting on their own time, and resisting our thirst for consumption. Soon after entering the space, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you may be an intruder who’s walked in on someone sleeping. These objects build an intimate, restful space that leverages the strict authority of silence instead of transactional performativity. It is a powerful moment in the work, as jones seems to draw parallels between refusal and tenderness, two gestures that intentionally de-privilege the gaze of the viewer.

As you travel through the space, you encounter more dolls resting on a rug made of braids—

the most protective of hairstyles. A strange sort of envy creeps in here, as our soles are subject to the bare wood floor while we witness the homies carefully cradled against the wall and nestled atop this delicately braided carpet. Time is intentionally slowed to a crawl and the soft figures are given a comforting mediator between their bodies and the bare ground.

“Toughness” is often a response to exterior threat and vulnerability. In contrast, I suggest that the tenderness in jones’s work implies a certain kind of belonging. Instead of promising liberation, it provides relief and real-time safety, even if only temporary. jones calls forth the architecture of place not with site specificity, but with what I would call site elasticity. The ceiling joins itself with a carefully woven net of dental floss—yet another reference to care for our bodies—and generously bends down to meet us on our level. The walls embrace their would-be performers and attempt to shield them from the voracious appetite of our gaze.

Black life and Black personhood is imbued with histories and identities of contested structures and grounds—within and on which we’ve spent generations trying to build a home. In this must be the place to be, jones not only affirms Black belonging, but reclaims these spaces as ours without need for proof or justification, and allows us to rest in them. Perhaps tenderness is impossible to hold in singularity. jones instead offers us a tenderness that is connective, creating a temporal condition that allows for a communion between our bodies and the spaces that we share.

In harmony with rod jones’s work and writing, artist names are presented in lowercase when stylized as such by the individual.

Didier William is originally from Port-auPrince, Haiti. He earned a BFA in painting from The Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA), The Museum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA), The Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and The Figge Museum Art Museum (Davenport, IA). He is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York and M+B Gallery in Los Angeles.

William was an artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in Brooklyn, NY. He has also been a recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2018), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grants (2020), and a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (2021).

He has taught at several institutions, including Yale School of Art, Vassar College, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and SUNY Purchase.

William is currently Assistant Professor of Expanded Print at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Black Queer Vernacular Art and the Beauty of rod jones ii

Logan Cryer

“The Lord told me to let it go.” –Wendy Jones

rod jones ii is not sure why his mother, Wendy Jones, sold her beauty salon in the summer of 2009. To this day, the only explanation she ever gave was an affirmation of her faith in the Lord. The salon was located on 67th and Broadway, just south of jones’s hometown of Gary, Indiana, a Rust Belt city with a population just under 70,000. Gary is one of the many Black hubs in the Midwest. A beauty salon is a hub within a hub, a place where Black hair and conversation are warmly accepted. jones grew up in his mother’s salon. He spent time there after school, answering the telephone: “Mark of Excellence, how may I help you?” He was made aware that whenever he went outside, there could always be a stranger who knew his mother. He had best act right, just in case.

The connection between the beauty salon and this must be the place to be, jones’s solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, is apparent from a material standpoint. His sculptures are constructed using Kanekalon hair, ABS nails, and plastic hair beads. Although he never learned to do hair himself at his mother’s salon, jones possesses the same patience needed to work with such fussy items; he braids, threads, and decorates with meticulous detail. jones’s pieces show off the labor of their creation the same way Black hair does: through evident repetition, thriftiness, abundance, and style.

The largest piece in the exhibition is made from dental floss and is loosely laced together to form a wide netting that billows within the gallery space. Hair beads rest in the nodes of the floss netting. These acrylic beads were chosen by color and texture, and they are threaded onto the floss in groups of only two or three, leaving the net nearly transparent. The teal color of the manufactured floss represents a hypothetical freshness. It is complemented by the cool tone of the beads that jones selected.

jones looks back on his childhood memories of his mother’s salon with both an intense familiarity and an alienated curiosity. this must be the place to be began as an examination of the beauty salon as both a social space and a proxy for his relationship with his mother. jones’s investigations consist of material research and experimental socio-spatial constructions. The sculptures, videos, and textiles that he creates are continuations of his anomalistic practice that is to say, a practice filled with creature creation and walls that come alive.

The “homies” represent an ongoing body of work that jones has developed over the length of his practice. These soft sculptures are made in various sizes and materials with pieces of scrap fabric that jones has found and sewn together. Their ambiguous forms slide between the humanoid and the insectile, and they possess the fierce vitality of dolls that have been sewn by self-taught

hands. The homies’ presence in the gallery can be interpreted through a number of lenses: as divine guardians; as representations of Blackness; as jones himself embodied in various forms; as the “other.” jones has intended for the homies to live in and occupy the gallery; visitors enter their world and bear witness to their space.

this must be the place to be plays with the humility embedded in entering an unfamiliar cultural space. Generally, an artist has the ability to invert the viewer’s sense of who belongs and who does not by imbuing the white cube with cultural signifiers. Many Black artists deploy an inversion in order to speak to Black audiences even within a white context. As a

consequence, non-Black audiences experience a positive transgression, an unusual sense of belonging amidst Blackness, when entering these inverted realms. By centering the homies, jones experiments with cultural signifiers that go beyond the racial to incorporate an ontological division as well. The net effect of this strategy is that no one is fully accepted into the exhibition because there is no way for human audiences to access a non-human experience.

This is not to say that the ultimate goal of jones’s work is to antagonize his audience. He has orchestrated a set of circumstances that make it impossible for the audience to conflate aesthetic appreciation and intellectual control. His practice draws upon the legacies of Black American artists such as Adrian Piper, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennifer Packer, Ulysess Jenkins, and Rodney McMillian in that it brings the viewer into their own self-awareness of who they are in relation to objects of art.

jones’s artwork has inspired me to create a term that contextualizes his practice as a new genre of artmaking: Black Queer Vernacular Craft (BQVC). I utilize this new term to describe an artist whose practice shows the following qualities: (1) an abundant collection of materials and resources sourced through scavenging, purchasing, archival research, etc.; (2) the explicit relationship of some of these collected materials to Blackness. (Blackness is a process); (3) an awareness on behalf of the artist of the spiritual and metaphysical qualities present within their sourced materials and/or completed works; and (4) a queerness within the work that is not displayed through didactic symbolism. (Queerness is a process).

BQVC is, to my observation, quite influential within Philadelphia, the city in which jones has resided since 2017. Notable artists whose practice can be described to live in and around this new genre of BQVC include: Vitche-Boul Ra, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism), and Jordan Deal. I would

posit that the prevalence of BQVC in Philadelphia is due, in part, to the small number of commercial galleries within the city, which has led to the formation of communities of artists who are motivated by aesthetic experimentation over marketability. The effect of this creative ecosystem is apparent in jones’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation. Most of the artworks in this must be the place to be remain unnamed, and the gestures that jones introduces into the gallery (expressively painting the walls; sculpting “arms” that carry the homies) do not form discrete pieces or distinct “artworks” in the eyes of the artist.

At this moment, jones’s exposure as an artist has not reached far beyond the city of Philadelphia. jones attended college with the intention to become a professional football player, and only became focused on visual art after a serious injury ended his football prospects. He graduated from Truman State University’s modest undergraduate Studio Art program in 2016, along with only one other student. When jones enrolled as a graduate student at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the following year, it was the first time he experienced working in his own studio. jones struggled to contextualize his artistic impulses within pre-established art spaces and art histories. In this must be the place to be, jones’s experience of moving through belonging and unfamiliarity has led him to create an empathetic world of uncommon folk. His prolific practice is just at the start.

All citations by the artist are drawn from interviews with the author of this essay.

Logan Cryer is a writer, artist, music lover, and curator living and learning in Philadelphia. They are a graduate of Moore College of Art and Design, where they majored in Fine Arts, and an alum of Headlong Performance Institute. They have a soft spot for awkwardness and revel in the boldness that young, queer, and/or poc artists bring to the world.

Serubiri Moses served as a mentor for this essay. Moses is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He has also lectured at the basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL) and The University of the Arts Helsinki (FI). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICAUSA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s coordinator for the program this season.

unttld, 2022

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CUE Art Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues.

Exhibiting artists are selected through one of two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and open call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing each exhibition.

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