Meet Alex Jones, curatorial research assistant at the Getty Research Institute, whose focus on African American art carries on his family’s legacy.
The gist of what I do: I’m a curatorial research assistant at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), working with modern and contemporary collections. Right now I’m researching feminist performance art that involves African American artists. I’m also working on the African American Art History Initiative, a program that focuses on encouraging scholarship, research, and collections related to African American art, a body of work that has always existed, but maybe hasn’t necessarily been given the attention or place in museums for decades, if not centuries. As part of the initiative, I’m doing research and digitizing items for an upcoming exhibition on the dancer Blondell Cummings, and also researching the archive of Charles Brittin, who photographed the Civil Rights movement in Los Angeles.
Growing up with art: I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, with the great fortune of having parents and grandparents who were avid collectors of Black art. My grandparents had a modest but really impressive collection of prints and original works from Black artists they had been collecting since the late 1960s. Art was always on the walls, so art, and depictions of Black people, were normalized for me at a very early age. My parents were keen on talking to me about how certain images in our house, some not even portraits, represented our family. I remember them asking me and my brother to look at a semi-abstract image of a Black jazz band and say who the figures looked like. I thought they were images of my actual aunts and uncles.
My grandparents talked about how the art related to their personal histories and how they acquired it. Both of them, but my grandmother in particular, were involved in Civil Rights actions starting in the ’50s and ’60s. One of the pieces they had was a Jacob Lawrence print, Confrontation at the Bridge. It shows demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 marches for voting rights and racial justice. They used this as a way to say, “This is what we’re talking about when we are explaining Civil Rights actions.” There was a lot of emphasis on the art’s relationship to the history of our family and also to the Black experience in the United States.
Growing up surrounded by this art built a belief for me that my identity was not fixed or stereotypical or determined by one definition, because all of the artwork in the houses I grew up in had all these very different explorations of Blackness.
Memorable family artworks: There’s a collaged Romare Bearden print of a maternal figure, referencing the classic Holy Mother, from the late 1940s that hung on our mantle. I associate it with spending time with my family. And my grandparents had two Joan Miró prints, which were mostly abstract—shapes and lines typical of Miró compositions. Those prints were very exciting for me because when I was talking to my grandmother about them, I noticed the same shape within both of them. My grandmother really validated that and said, “You’re able to see things that maybe other people aren’t seeing.” I remember feeling like art was really special—that the coincidence was not obvious, but something unique to the process of art making. She would also ask me why I thought Miró used the shape between the two, which helped me think about patterns and references.
From Kansas City to Getty: The major breakthrough for me about studying art started in high school when I took my first art history course, an introductory course that spanned medieval art through the current age and was split into two years. It was the one class where I felt the most confident about what I was being asked to write about and think about. I felt like, how is this school? We’re talking about paintings. I went to Brown University and initially wanted to major in art, but I was disappointed by the lack of courses that involved Black art. So I switched my focus to African American literature during the 1960s and ’70s, a time period I was drawn to because of the family narratives I was exposed to. I also felt like that period, for all its triumphs and heroics, was the most ambivalent period in terms of how African Americans politically, socially, and culturally have advanced in this country. After graduating I worked as a project manager for a web design firm for three years, but I ultimately wanted to build a career in museums and knew a master’s degree would be necessary for the type of positions I wanted, so I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a master’s degree in art history.
In graduate school I saw a posting for an internship at the GRI to help with the African American Art History Initiative. I applied, with all of my heart, with all of my determination. Very few institutions, in 2018 at least, were offering paid internship positions that were about African American art. It’s not that I couldn’t find internship opportunities at other museums, but they wouldn’t have been a perfect fit, without twisting and turning, like this one was.
Moving to California had also been a dream of mine since I was 17. I can’t explain why I wanted to live in California so badly. I don’t have any family in California. We didn’t even visit California. I just wanted to be here, and I almost went to UCLA instead of Brown but was attracted to Brown’s open curriculum. So that aspect of the internship took no convincing at all. After the internship ended, I applied for a curatorial research assistant position which allowed me to stay and continue my work.
Surprising research finding: In the Charles Brittin archive, which includes photographs from the Civil Rights era, there’s a series that was shot during a protest at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in 1965. Before undergoing this research, I did not have a working understanding of what the Civil Rights era looked like in California. The Black Panther era in Oakland was certainly relevant to me, but I thought Los Angeles was not a focus of that history.
Brittin’s photographs are devastating because they’re showing the interactions between protesters, many of them Black, and local and federal communities and police. And it’s not pretty. You see really drastic scuffles, really ugly imagery, though there’s a beauty to how Charles Brittin photographed it, which is really complicated. I’ve been really drawn to his archive and to those items.
Favorite artwork at Getty: The Deposition, from about 1490, by a follower of Rogier van der Weyden. I had to do extensive research on a Rogier van der Weyden altarpiece and became obsessed with the biblical Crucifixion narrative—up to the Last Judgment. This work is the climax of that story, when Christ is removed from the cross and mourned by his apostles. It’s the height of tragedy and painters used this scene to explore depictions of human emotion and desperation. I love northern Renaissance and Flemish painters, and I almost switched the focus of my master’s degree from African American art to medieval French and Flemish painting after a really inspiring graduate seminar. The mastery behind how these painters affect light, the surface of the painting, how they’re using paint—the more I learned about that, the more I thought, this is incredible. I don’t know if anybody’s really going to beat this.
Why diversity in museum collections and research matters: Excluding diverse artists limits and narrows our understanding of what is possible in the realm of art making. It’s not a competition. It is not about who’s better than whom. I worry sometimes that people think that by advancing African American art and other types of art, like Indigenous American art and Latin American art, we’re saying that this is more precious than white, European art. That conversation is not interesting to me at all, if only because it accepts a kind of hierarchical thinking that has marginalized artistic communities for centuries. When people say Black lives matter, they’re not saying only Black lives matter. The point is that there is so much actually available to us, and the limitations are actually our collective loss.
