Publications
Dr. Jones is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017). In addition, she has contributed essays and interviews to a variety of publications. Please consider supporting your local bookstore with any purchase.
South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond.
EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art
A daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and social justice across the river in Newark. The activist vision of art and culture that she learned in those two communities, and especially from her family, has shaped her life and work as an art critic and curator. Featuring selections of her writings from the past twenty years, EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists who have challenged established art practices. Interviews that she conducted with the painter Howardena Pindell, the installation and performance artist David Hammons, and the Cuban sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the photographers Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, and Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist Betye Saar; and the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving. Reflecting Jones’s curatorial sensibility, this collection is structured as a dialogue between her writings and works by her parents, her sister Lisa Jones, and her husband Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones, insight into the development of her critical and curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most important figures in contemporary art.
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Black Refractions: The Studio Museum in Harlem
(The Museum of the African Diaspora, Gibbes Museum of Art, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Smith College Museum of Art, Frye Art Museum, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 2019-2020)
Includes my interview with Thelma Golden and Connie Choi and
ESSAY: “The Studio Museum in Harlem: Ancient to the Future”
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Interview with Hank Willis Thomas for
Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal...
(Portland Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, 2019-2020)
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Charles White, A Retrospective
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2018)
Sarah Kelly Oehler, ed.
ESSAY: “Charles White, Feminist at MidCentury”
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Odyssey: Jack Whitten, Sculpture 1963-2017
(Baltimore Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018)
ESSAY: “Mediterranean Conversations”
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We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985: New Perspectives
(New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2018)
Rujeko Hockley and Catherine Morris, eds.
ESSAY: “Swimming with E.C.”
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Elizabeth Murray, Painting in the ‘80s
(New York: Pace Gallery, 2017)
ESSAY: “Assured Calamity: Elizabeth Murray’s 1980s”
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