Ronald Jones (interdisciplinarian)

Ronald Jones (born July 8, 1952 in the United States) an artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s. In the magazine Contemporary, Brandon Labelle wrote: "Working as an artist, writer, curator, professor, lecturer and critic over the last 20 years, Jones is a self-styled Conceptualist, spanning the worlds of academia and art, opera and garden design, and acting as paternal spearhead of contemporary critical practice. Explorative and provocative, Jones creates work that demands attention that is both perceptual and political." Labelle positions Jones along the leading edge of a "contemporary critical practice" that is perhaps best described as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.

Jones graduated in 1974, with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montomery, Alabama's Huntingdon College. He completed an MFA degree in sculpture from the University of South Carolina, followed by a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University where he wrote about a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp. In 1983, he was included in a group exhibition titled "A Likely Story," at Artists space in New York City which was curated by Valerie Smith and included Gretchen Bender, David Cabrera, and Jeff Koons. In 1985 he moved to New York City and two years later had his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures Gallery. In the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: "Mr. Jones's main goal seems to be to thwart the eye with formal incoherence and an overload of written information that the mind must digest before his pieces make sense. But the sense made is never visual. Instead, if one wades through the long illustrated paragraph that constitutes each work's title, learning the artwork or event that each component represents, a kind of odd and often frightening poetic logic accrues." Jones is represented by Metro Pictures Gallery where his last of six solo shows was in 1998.

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