Artists don’t always like to acknowledge their forerunners. It’s understandable: nobody wants to be called a copycat. Originality means stepping out of the mentor’s shadow. Audiences contribute to this, too. We like to imagine that we’re standing in the presence of something that sprung from the head of its creator. Coaches are mainly confined to the sidelines, when we think about them at all.
Yet some artists cast shadows too long to ignore. Ben Jones, 82, has taught at New Jersey City University (2039 Kennedy Blvd.) for forty-three years, providing guidance, perspective, and training to several generations of aspirants. Among his pupils and protégés are some of the region’s most celebrated painters, printmakers, and sculptors. He’s not an influencer, he’s an influence — and a sumptuous pair of shows at the University galleries gives his students (and his audience) an opportunity to acknowledge that debt and say thanks.
“The Universe of Ben Jones,” which will hang at the City University until April 3, lets the master strut his stuff. He’s been making art in the Garden State for the better part of six decades — he’s got a studio in a Bergen-Lafayette church — so he’s got plenty to show off, including several exciting pieces that even Jones aficionados won’t know. Curators Casey Mathern of William Paterson University (where Jones was educated) and Midori Yoshimoto of NJCU (where Jones holds an emeritus teaching position) have filled the Lemmerman Gallery with paintings, cutouts, silkscreens, lithographs, and sculptures that exhibit the artist’s characteristic vivacity, gutsiness, occasional combativeness, and warmth. Like a pot on boil, the show bubbles over and into the Hepburn Hall corridor, where Jones’s lively prints goose up an otherwise staid administrative floor. It’s plain to see what drew students to this generous, playful, emotionally effulgent teacher, and it’s equally apparent why so many local artists continue to cite him as an inspiration.
Those students have made some charismatic works of their own. At the NJCU Visual Arts Gallery (100 Culver Ave.), Mathern and Yoshimoto are, simultaneously, putting that work on view and making a point about the enduring value of arts education. The twenty artists who’ve contributed pieces to “Constellations,” a companion to “The Universe of Ben Jones,” include several who share their inspiration’s commitment to arts education and symbolic literacy. The empathetic Bisa Washington, for instance, teaches in Morristown. Mansa K. Mussa presides over classes at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit and the Newark Museum. Richard La Rovere, a draftsman and illustrator fascinated by Garden State architecture, has hung his work in the Jersey City Public Library. Lucy Rovetto, painter of dreamscapes and spectral bodies in motion, has been featured at the Museum of Jersey City History.
Exactly what did Ben Jones impart to these ambitious, thoughtful artists? We’ll never know exactly, but “Universe” and “Constellations” drop some hints. Throughout his career, Jones has been drawn to vivid hues and clear, unambiguous shapes; his prints, in particular, are dotted with fierce, searing fields of pigment that amplify the intensity of the bodies of his human subjects. “Deliver the Funk” juxtaposes an image of an African-American man in glowing orange trousers with slices of fruit, concentric hearts, open mouths, and scribbles of primary colors that feel like lipstick traces on a white wall. This is Pop Art of sorts, but there’s not much irony, and there’s no trace of kitsch. Instead, everything is awash in erotic energy. This electric charge zaps us even harder in a pair of explicitly sexualized images of reclining men, each with pendulous genitals and eyes that fizz and crackle with awareness.
This same audacity is present in the work of “Constellations” artist Mustart, a muralist who has been playing Jonesian tricks on brick walls all over Jersey City. Painter Ray Arcadio, too, plops outrageous angled headdresses on black and white bodies. “Bombastic,” a freewheeling fusion of cartoonishness, cubism, fashion model aesthetics and Afrofuturism, feels like a proud, direct descendant of Jones’s characters. It’s not quite as raw or sexy. But it’ll quicken your pulse nonetheless.
Jones, to paraphrase Chuck D, does not paint for the sake of riddling. His visual storytelling is brutally direct. The themes of his pieces aren’t hard to tease out: they’re right there on the surface, forcefully presented, and, often, salient to the main line of African-American resistance history. In one mixed-media assembly, a defiant Huey Newton stares out between white bars; an enthroned Eldridge Cleaver hovers over his shoulder. “The King Family,” a lithograph made after MLK’s assassination, surrounds the faces of the Reverend’s children with circles, stars, and symbols of power, as if the printmaker is determined to guard them. A powerful protective streak runs through all of his work, including his “Shrine For the Spirit,” a wall-hugging sculpture in which the artist lovingly wraps the faces and torsos of black men in strips, circles, and boomerangs of bright color. In its care, and faith in the power of ornamentation, decoration, and acts of love, it feels maternal.
His students demonstrate a similar awareness of the dangerous dynamics of modern living — and similar narrative forcefulness. “Four Men in a Bar,” an aluminum print by the mischievous Orlando Cuevas, is a blunt expression of COVID-era disorientation and paranoia, complete with a plague doctor, a leering television-headed monster, and a humanoid figure who appears to be morphing, or melting, into an ambulatory clock. Josephine Barreiro’s frightening, bloody, endlessly stare-worthy “Cat Devouring Bird” echoes Jones’s juxtaposition of street-art intensity and classical drama. Danielle Scott confronts the history of the civil rights movement and African-American disenfranchisement in her work; like Jones (and Barreiro), she strikes a balance between the urgency of renegade art and the poise of the museum gallery. She, too, presents us with African-American faces in newsprint grayscale. Then she graces them with haloes: ones reminiscent of those in the devotional portraits of the Renaissance.
That, too, isn’t atypical of her mentor. Ben Jones’s work is suffused with earthy sensuality and globetrotting spirituality in equal measure. He finds space in his canvases for Yoruba religious symbols and Asian characters; recent pieces like “Connected” foreground a near-mystic vision of environmental and technological rapprochement. And even if he’s taken what he’s found there and re-made it in his own image, “The Universe of Ben Jones” suggests that the artist is no stranger to the traditional African-American church. He’s fitted portraits of female jazz singers on fans that resemble those that congregants in the back pews use to wave away the heat. Elsewhere, he reminds us that American Christianity is a syncretic affair, full of signs, symbols, imagery, and visual rhythms borrowed from Africa and the Deep South. In his pieces, the cross, the ankh, and the West African shango all speak of the same longing for transcendence, guidance, and divine protection.
There’s a Jones piece in the “Constellations” show, too, right alongside the work of artists whose lives he’s touched. Appropriately, it’s the largest thing in either gallery. It’s a tapestry of sorts: a grid dotted with hundreds of images of Trayvon Martin’s face, some inverted, some x-ed out, some graced with hearts and some troubled with question marks, and a few cracked right down the middle. An oval mat on the floor contains a bouquet of flowers and a heap of toy guns. Ever the teacher, he’s putting a question to us. Which youth do we see? A danger to us, or someone in need of assistance? Will we arm ourselves against our neighbors, or will we choose to open our hearts and make a gesture of love? Let it be known that Ben Jones always chose the flowers. Like all acts of faith, his was a dangerous choice. Painting by painting and piece by piece, he put his heart on the line. He’s still here, and his message is still resonating.
(An opening event for “The Universe of Ben Jones” will be held at NJCU on Saturday, January 27 at 3 p.m.; visit https://www.njcu.edu/community/events/universe-ben-jones.)