Art direction Art direction Art direction
Jordan Jones will provide curation, programming and leadership to the Jacob Lawrence Gallery.
By Viewpoint Staff | Photo by Dennis Wise | Viewpoint Magazine
Jordan Jones, an artist and curator, arrived in Seattle this spring to join the Jacob Lawrence Gallery as its director and curator. Most recently, she was exhibitions coordinator at Independent Curators International, a small nonprofit that supports curators who don’t have a home organization or museum.
Jordan Jones
She has also been a curatorial fellow at the Studio Museum in Harlem and The Museum of Modern Art. “I had amazing projects and from my base in New York was able to work with communities and and institutions across the globe,” she says.
Based in New York for the past five years allowed her to be close to home and work on both small and large projects. “It was a great training ground,” Jones says. Some of her projects brought her in contact with university museums and galleries. “I was amazed at the sense of community formed around those art spaces,” she says. “I wanted that for myself.”
When Jones saw the opportunity to work at the UW’s gallery named for Jacob Lawrence, “a lot of things aligned for me,” she says. “It is an amazing university space, and I really like its focus on social justice, education and experimentation.”
Jordan arrived on campus just in time for the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency exhibition, featuring 2024 resident Simon Benjamin. The residency is a signature program of the gallery that invites Black artists at all stages of their careers to spend up to four weeks at the UW developing and exhibiting new work. Benjamin, a Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in New York, spent three weeks on campus in March and April. During his stay, he used the gallery as a studio space and engaged students in his creative process.