March 6, 2025

Artist to Watch

DONCHRISTIAN JONES

NB: So what are some of your earliest memories of creating art? Where did it all begin? How do your roots continue to influence your practice?  

DCJ: I think it started at home drawing at a very young age. From what I’m told, I was just always drawing and that’s all I wanted to do. I collected cars, so I was often drawing cars or my mom and aunts in big ball gowns standing next to their cars. I did that for years and I still have many of those old little drawings and some of them are included in my most recent show at MoMA Ps1.   

NB: The theme of cars, your mom, and her sisters in ball gowns is still a motif that appears through your work.  
DCJ: It surely is, and that piece ‘Volvo Truck’ was hugely inspired by finding those drawings and remembering how formative it was just being with them. It’s really them who raised me. Being in the back seat of their cars, listening to music, driving around Philadelphia in the 90s and 2000s that inspired that piece.  

NB: How do you prepare for a performance? Is there research, rituals, or any sort of preparation that goes into it?  

DCJ: Well, site specificity is hugely important to me. So every project, commission, work, or performance, I really take into account the space, the time and the culture of the space. Thinking, who are the people and audience that are likely going to be there? Thinking heavily and carefully about who is this for and and why, and with hopes of being or creating the most generous piece I possibly can. That means spending time beforehand really studying the space, it’s architecture, it’s infrastructure. How does one get there? The light and all the sensations.  So I do think there’s a matter of study.  Then there’s also the collective memory of a space, the history, the traces, and remnants of those that were there before. The question is how to honor that reverence for those things and people?

NB: Community and human connection is at the core of your practice. Can you share with us why you think those are so important today? And how does music relate to this? What have you learned from it?  

DCJ: I think community and connection are really central because in my mind, it adds insurmountable value  – the more people that are connected to a work, or that helped make the work, means their hearts, their minds, their hands, their literal handwork, extends not only to the shelf life of the work, but it memorializes it. Collaborators become stakeholders and they have skin in the game and there’s more people invested in its success. In my mind I think it makes for richer, more charged work. And that includes music as well. Music I think is my first love honestly. Drawing and music, though I think things are kind of predicated by music even.

Music inspires me, and gets me through life. I love working with my friends, creating with my friends and loved ones, rather than creating in the vacuum of solitude. I’m just not that kind of artist, though I can respect and admire it. I’m more efficient when I’m working around and with others. Again, this kind of speaks to that collective memory and community that forms around the work or around a show versus something that just kind of lives in isolation. I ask myself “What is the magic that we’re imbuing in this piece? What is the intention that we’re setting?” And the more people that are involved in that process makes for greater magic.

NB: What are some influences in your work? What’s the first song on your playlist?  

DCJ: Right now I’m going to say Horace Silver, A song for my father. It keeps following me and appearing in unsuspecting ways so it’s been on my playlist. It was also the first song on the 1st CD in my dad’s CD changer in his car. There’s a lot of Jazz, Afro, Cuban music, bossa Nova, and then soul, like Philly soul and rap, and R&B for sure, like nineties, 2000s, rapping, R&B.   

NB: Can you tell us about Public Assistants?  

DCJ: It’s a passion project rooted in community, a baby of mine that’s become the village’s and it’s simply something I stumbled on. It was founded in the pandemic in June of 2020 as a space for convening and organizing and a mutual aid hub. When everyone was out of work and we were organizing and protesting, I was doing a lot of sign and banner painting for friends. So when all of that was happening, PPE distribution and hot meal and food distribution, I was one of the sign painters. I knew somebody that knew somebody that had keys to this vacant, blighted, abandoned lot in Crown Heights, and it was around a 6,000 square foot commercial lot that had just been sitting there. It had been an old methadone clinic, pawn shop, Thai restaurant and, laundromat, at the corner of Franklin Ave and Park Place. This was really like the apex of Crown Heights gentrification, this corner was so charged, so trafficked, and to think that there’s this huge lot just sitting abandoned for 3-4 years was wild. So they gave me the keys.  

I opened it up one night, took a picture of a tip jar and I held it up on my Instagram saying “help us get this place cleaned up”. I just knew that my community could use it, if only to paint banners. The next morning when I woke up I had $4000 in my Venmo, and I was just in awe. I was so shocked to think of the level of engagement, that there were all these people that were willing to donate. From that day on I showed up to that space for 90 consecutive days, there was not a day that summer, spring into summer, that I did not go there.  

Every day, friends, old students, and family would meet me there in the mornings. They helped me paint the walls, we got a community fridge, we put up one mural outside that said ‘what y’all really want?’ and we hung chalk lines so people could write on the wall what they wanted for their community. They wrote things like “arts for our kids, our laundromat back, affordable food, bikes and bike repair.” And so we started doing all those things: we started a bike repair initiative, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and people started donating bike parts. By that time I’m also getting donations of sewing machines, iPads, computers, books, clothes, and it just became a mutual aid hub and a Resource Center. We started paying the local youth to paint the murals, so that summer we initiated our first youth residency program which we did for 3 summers. We refurbished 80 bikes and prioritized giving them to women of color. We were giving out hundreds of pounds of food weekly. We put up raised beds in the back and had a garden. We didn’t limit ourselves to any medium. It became a practice of skillshare and skill building together. We did all the carpentry and renovation inside the laundromat ourselves, ripped out all the pipes and exposed wires and then filled it, and that became like a third space, a makerspace. We were there for a year before they kicked us out. And then it and then it became this project that I couldn’t let go of, so I did some fundraising grant writing to keep it going.

We’re now in our third space and in our fifth year, and we’ve been the recipient of the Rauschenberg Artist Council grant three years in a row.  We got a Ford grant to run a fellowship of artists for two years and just a lot of like smaller support from micro grants and a lot of people donating. And now we’re a community radio station, we’re a print shop, we published artist books, and tons of zines. 

You can come consult with us and we’ll likely figure out a way to help implement your project idea.   

NB: Where is it located now? 

DCJ: Right now we’re in Bed Stuy.   

NB: So tell us a little bit about your project here at MoMA PS1. How does this project connect to the public? How is this project is a continuation from Public Assistants and the Adobe Creative Residency ?

DCJ: Well, I became the first Adobe creative resident at MoMA last January, which I’m still processing the level of support and just the scale of of the project and all the people involved. But my project was really based on continuing public assistants and styling it in a way that it becomes an artwork in itself. Rather than it just being another nonprofit, I wanted it to become a chronicling of the histories of all the people and collaborators involved, all of the friends of mine that inspire me or whose own art inspires me, and then also chronicle my years of creating in this way.  And because it’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for 15 years, I just don’t even know where the time went.  

I think it’s easier for me to view everything under the umbrella of performance. And when I think about things in that way, it allows for me to be more generous and intentional about how I serve a community or create art.  So it’s a durational performance that I’ve been a part of for the past year and will continue through this installation and exhibition.This performance goes beyond that and presents this new lens through which I create this idea of thinking of myself as a public eye rather than a private one. Often people tell me this and I feel it a lot of the time, in ways I mean to feel less laborious or that I’m like a fixer often in community.  

And so I thought about ‘how can I make this a part of my practice rather than it be something that pulls me away from creating?’ such that when I’m picking up someone from the airport or have to go help someone move out of their apartment, or I’m helping find legal aid for someone that needs it, how can that be a part of my practice?  

NB: But it’s also infusing joy.  

DCJ: It is also doing that.  

*DonChristian Jones: The Sumptuous Discovery of Gotham a Go-Go at MoMA Ps1 is on view through April 28, 2025.