Samuel Levi Jones
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Samuel Levi Jones's solo exhibition, Conscious Intuition, on view in the gallery from May 11 to June 17, 2023 (Opening reception on Thursday, May 11, 2023, 6:00pm – 8:00pm). The conversation will be followed by a brunch reception with the artist.
Join the artist in conversation with Danny Dunson, Director of Curatorial Services and Community Partnerships for The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, as they discuss Jones's practice and the works on view, including Jones's first major sculptural installation and the paintings and sculptures.
About the Speakers
Samuel Levi Jones is inspired by questions of authority, representation, and recorded history. The artist is known for challenging historical and contemporary power structures through the act of taking apart "source" material, generating new perspectives from which to grapple with society’s ongoing ignorance and apathy. Jones’s practice centers on physically undoing objects associated with systems of power and control, often rearranging deconstructed books into grid-like compositions that expose their flaws and question their assumed command of the truth. As he explains, “I am ultimately thinking about information that is selectively left out.” His works examine urgent questions of how oppression is embedded in systems of law enforcement and education, as well as industries in medicine, athletics, and fine art.
Solo exhibitions include The Empire is Falling at The Dayton Contemporary, Ohio; Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indiana; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York. Recent museum exhibitions include Art of California: Greater than the Sum, SFMOMA, San Francisco, California; Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Guiffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Illinois. His work can be found in museum and public collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington. In 2014, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, an annual award presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem, whose past recipients include prominent artists such as Leslie Hewitt, Glenn Ligon, and Lorna Simpson.
Jones was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1978, and lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Danny Dunson is an art historian, art advisor, curator, and writer and the Director of Curatorial Services and Community Partnerships for The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center. Dunson graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, earning a BA in Art History from the School of Art & Art History. He is a 2016 Fulbright Grant recipient and Gilman Scholarship, fellow. His research as an art historian has been primarily focused on figurative representations within African and African Diasporic Art.
In June 2018, Dunson presented In Memoriam, Portraits of the Middle Passage, in Situ, a large-scale exhibition in the dungeons of Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle Museum, featuring the art of the Ancestor Project, a visual art collective with Ghanaian artist, Kwame Akoto-Bamfo at the helm.
Dunson is currently conducting research that interrogates portraiture and figurative compositions aligned with space, place, memory, and the Middle Passage. Through his work with Legacy Brothers and Lab, curated a group exhibition presented by Gallery 1957 in Accra, Ghana entitled Collective Reflections: African and Diasporic Expressions of a New Vanguard in 2020.
Most recently Dunson curated Nick Cave/ Jack Cave: The Color Is Fashion Exhibition installed at The DuSable Museum Roundhouse from August to December of 2022, and Diaspora Stories: From the CCH Pounder Collection opening March 2023 at The DuSable Museum.
