As a teenager in Chicago, she was interested in punk rock. While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1980s, she found herself drawn to the abstract works of artists like Piet Mondrian and Agnes Martin. At the same time, she began exploring avant-garde music and the work of Black jazz musicians like Cecil Taylor. Her fascination with both the avant-garde and jazz—and the exclusion of Black artists from the history of modernism—became a driving force in her practice.

In the 2000s, Jones used earphones, cassette cases, and CD racks in her sculptures. With the shift toward digital music, she moved away from this language into primarily sonic-based, site-specific installations. Since then, Jones has created minimalist works in gray and black that appear to be traditional painted canvases, but which serve as acoustic panels that play mixes of music. The abstract compositions—both visual and aural—of her work suggest an artistic tradition and message that is not immediately available to the eye. In using sound to reframe Minimalism, she engages in the legacy of a movement that is dominated by a handful of white artists and points to new modes of understanding visual art and music. Jones’s work defies classification as either painting or sculpture, and instead creates environments that offer dynamic social and physical perception. Her “acoustic paintings” have also pointed to visual representations of sound waves and examined the contrast between silence and noise.

Jones received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Rutgers University. Jones’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum including Freestyle (2001); 30 Seconds off an Inch (2009); and Shift: Project | Perspectives | Directions (2012). She is also the 2012 recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize.