A Sumptuous Discovery at MoMA PS1: DonChristian Jones '12
Around the Exhibit
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Patterned wallpaper and vintage media equipment evoke a sense of nostalgia while shows and music videos from Jones's work as a musician on the tv and projected on the mirror (a custom build invented by Jones for this exhibit) provide a modern twist.
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Visitors can rifle through an eclectic selection of albums—everything from "Between Heaven and Hell" by Oscar Brown Jr., and "All 'n All" by Earth, Wind & Fire, to "Anti" by Rihanna—and play them on the turntable, altering the mood of the space with their selections.
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“Art is a perfect vehicle to explore issues centered on personal history, location, memory, and popular culture,” said Professor of Art Tula Telfair P’13, who has worked closely with Jones since they were an undergraduate art studio major. “The thing that's so remarkable about Don is that—there are no defined edges between the varied practices that serve their creative impulse. Their passion for social engagement and creating space for collective and independent expression informs and inspires every form of Don’s creative output.”
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Every aspect of the installation was customized for the exhibit, including the paneling, wall colors, and cozy corners inviting visitors to sit and fully engage with the various intentional pieces scattered throughout the space.
“I wanted to create something that feels timeless—it's like a portal into something that is both past, present, and future,” Jones said, noting wide-ranging reference points such as Mad Men, Charlie's Angels, Shaft, and Carmen Sandiego. “I wanted people to question ‘What era are we in? What decade is this?’”
The interactive exhibit, titled The Sumptuous Discovery of Gotham a Go-Go, represents the culmination of Jones’s yearlong tenure as the inaugural Adobe Creative Resident for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The first artist to be selected for this residency, Jones was chosen by The Adobe Foundation as “a New York City–based artist with a demonstrated commitment to engaging communities as part of their practice.”
MoMA described the installation as both a portal into Jones’s varied creative personas (as a teacher, painter, rapper, performer, and artist) and an extension of Jones’s "ongoing practice of world-building, where fruitful encounters and performances may happen at any moment, online and in real life, at times programmed and at others by chance or necessity."
Jones said they are interested in ever-changing, site-specific, improvisation-based performances, where it is unclear when it begins or when it ends. “It makes people question ‘What is real?’ Like, ‘Are we in the performance,’ or…?”
It’s a practice that isn’t bound by any one artistic medium. As an artist, musician, producer, and hyper collaborative, Jones’s work crosses genres, employing painting, music, film, time-based performance, and installation. They invite collaborators to work on music and dance and depict beloved family and friends in visual art and performance installations.
“I don't want to feel so compartmentalized a person where I'm taking off this hat and now I'm a teacher, and now I'm an artist, and now I'm a singer,” Jones said. “I want all these things to amalgamate and become one. [The exhibit] is very much like a retrospective.”
Influences and Memories
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A bulletin board of ephemera includes a letter from Jones’s father mailed to them while they were at Wesleyan with a clip from The New Yorker about Glenn Ligon '82, Hon. '12 and encouraging Jones in the development of their artistic pursuits.
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A box Jones made as a senior at Wesleyan is mounted in a glass vitrine, part of a trio of vitrine-protected items that Jones calls their founding objects. The box is meant to house their parents’ bones after death and was made during a class taught by Visiting Artist in Residence in Dance Eiko Otake P’07, ’10. Otake has been a huge influence on Jones’s art. “There's probably no one else that I've collaborated with longer or deeper than her,” Jones said.
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The second of three items in its own vitrine is a 1912 book printed for the 75th anniversary of the 1837 founding of Wesleyan’s Eclectic Society, for which Jones served as president. Wesleyan friend Danica Pantic ’09 was the main set designer for the exhibition, helping Jones source items from eBay and estate auctions, and Julian Wellisz ’10 assisted with ideation. "Wesleyan and Eclectic exploded my conceptions of what art could be," said Jones.
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Jones's father, Frederic Douglas Jones II, passed away in February 2024. “I’d been ruffling through my dad's archive,” Jones said. “I found this handwritten list from the ’60s, it just says ‘former gang members’ so I’m left to deduce this was the gang he was in, and the streets that they lived on.”
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Another artifact from Jones's time at Wesleyan and evidence of his longstanding preoccupation with community and unity.
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An illustrated journal of Rikers Island reflections edited by Jones sits on a lamp table for visitors to pick up and read. "My first job out of school was painting murals in the community," Jones said of working with incarcerated youth on Rikers Island. “Rikers changed everything. I was there for five years. And that just shattered my notions of the world or what I believed in, because of the wild atrocity of that space."
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A small photo of the artist's father sits on a table, another nod to familial roots, community, and the myriad influences contributing to this retrospective. "I'm realizing now after a year of being in this,” Jones said, "that my 'sumptuous discovery' has been that my dad has been doing this all along—all he ever wanted to do was connect his friends, to put people on, to make beautiful things, to make people laugh."
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A TV broadcasting a fake television station [“Network Gotham”] streams Jones’s music videos, Public Assistants commercials, and public service announcements about the police. “It feels like an MTV channel, my dad's art—it's everything,” Jones said. “And that's the goal—that these things aren't separated anymore.”
The Work of Public Assistants
Central to Jones’s multi-layered, multi-genre artistic practice is their commitment to community-based organizing that blends practical everyday resourcing for communities in need with creative solutions that both inform and become part of Jones’s art. “That's all I’ve really been doing for 10 years,” Jones said. “I was trying to figure out, how do I make Public Assistants ‘the work’?”
Founded by Jones in June 2020, Public Assistants is a cohort of interdisciplinary creators and a community design lab; a hub for a comprehensive mutual-aid network; a base for organizing; and a space for queer and trans people of color to skill-share, create, and cultivate joy. They situated Public Assistants as an art project, thinking of the project as an ethos, or ideas to be implemented. “Black people are community. Brown people are community. Queer people are community. Our existence is radical. Our joy is even more so.”
In addition to an embroidery studio run by Danica Pantic ‘09 and a printshop, Public Assistants hosts pro-bono and donation-based public programs including a weekly book club, auricular acupuncture, and performances. Other outreach and education activities have included a paid youth mural residency program, community medic training, a free bike repair and refurbish initiative, a community fridge and garden, toy and coat drives, hot meal/care package distribution, and wellness workshops for collective care and resilience.
Jones founded the art and service collective Public Assistants during the height of the COVID pandemic as a way to counter systemic inequity and neglect with solutions guided by art, creativity, and community-building.
Integrating Public Assistants items into the exhibit and incorporating collaborators into the retrospective was an early consideration, with items from Public Assistants work interspersed with artifacts from Jones’s personal family history and curated set pieces meant to evoke the immersive experience.
Reading material with Public Assistants ads are casually mixed in with other browsable items on the coffee table; recordings and videos from various Public Assistants events are streamed on the tv; and influences from the Public Assistants office space in Brooklyn even made their way into the physical installation of the exhibit space.
The third iteration of Jones's Public Assistants office space was located in a former Bed-Stuy dry cleaner space in Brooklyn, Personality Cleaners. Jones kept the name on the storefront exterior of the building. “That's another tenet of Public Assistants—transforming raw alternative space and making it useful to communities without negating what was once there, adhering to the authenticity of what was once there.”
“I think the biggest challenge was how to transfer the energy of Public Assistants to the space [of MoMA PS1],” said MoMA PS1’s Assistant Curator Elena Ketelsen González, who helped Jones organize and transform the empty gallery space to match Jones’s vision. “For me, it was most important to really bring that community-driven energy and ethos into the space.”
Ketelsen González said it quickly became apparent that whatever happened as a result of Jones’ residency couldn't be a stagnant, untouchable exhibition. “Oftentimes at a museum, there's a painting show, a sculpture show, and you're not so much invited into the process of the making of those things, whereas the idea of a ‘mise-en-scène’—it's meant to be activated,” Ketelsen González said, noting that when visitors walk into the space, even if nothing is happening, there is a suspenseful, undiscovered energy that something could happen at any time. “It’s a very sensory experience.”
“You see all these collaborators, their photos, what we did together, the Lower East Side Girls Club radio show will be playing on the speaker. You'll be able to toggle through audio," said Jones.
There’s a German word—Gesamtkunstwerk. It’s like a total work of art that employs every medium possible. This MoMA thing feels like that, times ten. Because it’s lived. I wake up in it. I go to bed in it. ”
Activating Moments of Hyper Collaboration
Highly promoted events and “activations” featuring chosen collaborators and communities and hosted in the exhibit space itself as well as in satellite locations deepened the collaborative experience and invited visitors into the performance. Activations included a community storytelling event, mural workshops at high schools in the Bronx and Queens, a radio camp and five-episode show [“Frequency Garden”] with the Lower East Side Girls Club, a secret soirée, and a performance installation in October 2024 with Wesleyan Visiting Artist in Residence in Dance Eiko Otake P’07, ’10, where the duo showed previously unseen video works from the past 10 years.
“The lifeblood is the moments of engagement,” Jones said. "The real goal is hyper-collaboration, and introducing seemingly disparate networks,” Jones said. “It’s something I’ve been doing all along, but now there’s greater intention.”
The retrospective, like Jones’s art, isn’t so much about the final execution, but the ongoing work and the shared creation between the artist, the community, their collaborators, and the people affected by and participating in the artistic process.
“I think I'm wondering what this will look like beyond the residency and exhibition and what shape it will take,” Jones said. “And I think that that's a constant—it's a perpetual question because it's meant to be so convertible and ever-changing. But I think that’s one of the answers I'm seeking—at the end of this, where should we go next?”
