The Roof Garden Commission and The Facade Commission at the MET Announcement
Jennie C. Jones (left) and Jeffrey Gibson (right)
On February 27, 2024 The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the artists for its 2025 commissions. Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) will produce her first multi-work outdoor sculptural installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. For The Met Fifth Avenue facade, Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado), a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, will create four figurative sculptures—works that he refers to as ancestral spirit figures.
The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones will be on view from April 15 through October 19, 2025. The Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.
The Met previously announced its 2024 commissions: The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj will be on view from April 29 through October 27, 2024; The Facade Commission: Lee Bul, from September 12, 2024, through May 27, 2025; and The Great Hall Commission: Tong Yang-Tze, from November 21, 2024, through April 8, 2025.
“As we anticipate the start of The Met’s 2024 commission series, we are thrilled to expand on the already robust program with the announcement of our exciting 2025 commission projects by the esteemed artists Jennie C. Jones and Jeffrey Gibson,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "Though stylistically different, both Jones and Gibson see the potential for beauty and form to carry the potency of individual and cultural histories. We're honored to have them join this important commission series and look forward to unveiling their works in 2025.
Through her sculptural installation for the 2025 Roof Garden Commission, Jones will explore the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities. In Jones’s unique response to modernism, these acoustic sculptures propose the line of the string as a proxy for art history, unbroken and continuous.
Gibson’s project for The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade will be the sixth in a series of commissions for the historic exterior. The artist’s new works for the niches will draw upon his longstanding and highly developed iconography, one built upon a dynamic visual language that fuses Indigenous identity and imagery with abstraction, patterning, materiality, and text. These projects are the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.
About the Artists
Jennie C. Jones, Other Octaves, 2024 Acrylic, acoustic panel, and architectural felt on canvas 48 x 48 x 2 1/2 in (121.9 x 121.9 x 6.3 cm) Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York
Jennie C. Jones
In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black improvisation and avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas, which absorb sound and affect the acoustic properties of the environment, to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.
Jennie C. Jones: New Compositions, Installation view Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2021) Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York
Her solo exhibitions include Jennie C. Jones: Compilation, at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015–16); Jennie C. Jones: RPM, at the Glass House (2018); Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure, at the Arts Club Chicago (2020); and, most recently, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Jones’s work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. She lives and works in Hudson, New York.
Installation view: ‘Jeffrey Gibson: DREAMING OF HOW IT’S MEANT TO BE’, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2024). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo by Lucy Dawkins.
Jeffrey Gibson
An interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea, Gibson’s expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract works to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which incorporates Indigenous identity and imagery—has consistently reimagined new possibilities for abstraction, the use of text, and queer culture, interconnecting these formal and conceptual interests. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring Indigenous sources, material elements, and imagery while regularly offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.
Jeffrey Gibson Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You, 2015 Mixed media Dimensions variable Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York
Recent solo exhibitions include This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Most recently, Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.
Credits
The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones is conceived by the artist in consultation with Lauren Rosati, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and Research Projects Manager in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Met.
The Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The commission is made possible in part by Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang, Sarah Arison, and Helen Lee-Warren and David Warren.
For more information about this announcement and the Met Gala, please visit the Met’s website and also visit their Instagram, YouTube, Facebook pages.
