Writer: Logan Cryer
Essay Mentor: Serubiri Moses
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition this must be the place to be by rod jones ii, with mentorship from Didier William and on view at CUE Art Foundation November 3rd, 2022 – January 7th, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
unttld, 2022. Resourced fabric, polyfil, waxed linen thread, leather. Approx. dimensions 60 x 60 x 42 in. Photo courtesy the artist.
“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.
Photo courtesy the artist.
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.
Photos by taylor manigoult.
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.
Photo courtesy 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 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.
About the Writer
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.
About the Mentor
Serubiri 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 delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, and The New School. 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.
About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (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.