Caroline A. Jones


Caroline A. Jones is an American art historian, author, curator, and critic. She teaches and serves within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Before completing her art history studies, Jones worked in museum administration and exhibition curation at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Harvard University Art Museums, and completed two documentary films. Her work has addressed topics including the human sensorium, the institutionalization of modernism and postmodernism, history and theory of technology, and intersections of art and science. Her exhibitions and films have been shown at several venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT's List Visual Arts Center. In 2013, Dr. Jones "reinvented" a full exhibition of the artist Hans Haacke formerly presented at MIT in 1967, titled .

Early life and education

Jones is the daughter of Virginia Sweetnam Jones and Edward E. Jones, a Princeton Psychology professor. She studied visual studies and art history, receiving an AB magna cum laude at Harvard-Radcliffe College and did graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 1992. She is the sister of Amelia Jones, another prominent contemporary art historian.

Career and research

Jones previously taught contemporary art and theory, and served as the director of museum studies, at Boston University; she currently is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her research into histories of artistic engagement with systems theory of the 1960s and 1970s extends to a critique of contemporary human systems that govern planetary conservation, in response to which Jones has called for a greater cultural emphasis on symbiosis and an interspecies commons. She has discussed her hope that contemporary artists can help to evolve human consciousness by changing the ways that humans sense the planet, using the term “symbiontics”.
Her 2017 is a history of the idea of "globalism" over a century of international art biennials. Her book ' was co-edited by Jones along with David Mather and Rebecca Uchill. That book convened conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists who explore the concept of "experience" across scientific, sensorial, and cultural realms.
Jones contributed an interview with artist Anicka Yi to the 2016 book ', published in conjunction with the 2015 exhibition by the same title at the List Visual Arts Center. Jones was one of the subjects of Yi's work in her 2015 exhibition You Can Call Me F, for which one hundred women contributed biological material to the gallery at The Kitchen. Yi intended with this work to align "society’s growing paranoia around contagion and hygiene with the enduring patriarchal fear of feminism and potency of female networks."
Jones authored Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, which demonstrates how theories of modernism in the work of controversial art critic Clement Greenberg were connected to his desire to prioritize, and therefore isolate, the sense of sight. Jones's book connects Greenberg's influential opinions in the category of art to positivist scientific philosophy and a culture of "bureaucratization of the senses."

Awards

Jones was a National Humanities Center Fellow in 2017-2018, a Radcliffe Fellow in 2013-2014, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, the Institute national d'histoire de l'art in Paris, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Max Planck Institüt, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Books