Exhibition of New Work by NJ Artist Troy Jones also Features Collections of African Masks
Blending traditional motifs with contemporary influences—from street style to digital design—Jersey City-based painter Troy Jones (b. 1974) reinterprets the mask as a living component of diasporic identity. Seven of Jones’s paintings are displayed alongside a selection of West African ceremonial masks he uses as studio props in creating these bold, modern portraits. Echoes of the Diaspora. A Study in Style, Culture, and the African Mask is Jones’ first solo museum exhibition, which opened June 18 and continues through September. Also on view are selections from the Morris Museum’s small but interesting holdings of African masks: three ceremonial masks—dating from the 20th century and coming from the Pende, Songye, and Chokewe people of modern-day Congo—and 12 miniature masks of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, commonly known as “passport masks” from multiple cultures living along equatorial West Africa’s Atlantic coast.
“In developing this exhibition,” said associate curator Bryant Small, “the presence of this remarkable cache in the Museum’s collection seemed like a golden opportunity to broaden and deepen our appreciation of masks within both their historic cultures and within American identity today.”
The mask in Jones’ hands is not a static relic but a living language—coded, celebrated, and reinterpreted across time and geography. In a recent review for NJarts.net, art critic Tris McCall states that “Echoes of the Diaspora draws connections between hip-hop style and practice, African religion and ritual, and daily life in the United States. In so doing, Jones isn’t merely linking hip-hop to African culture. He is tethering ordinary American existence to African culture.”
About Troy Jones
Jones received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from New Jersey City University in 2015. Over the years, Jones has exhibited widely across the northeast and also internationally, notably, at Casa de Africa in Havana, Cuba’s 25th anniversary exhibition in 2016. In 2020, he sold out his first solo show at the Black Wall Street Gallery in Soho, New York City. For more than three decades, Jones has studied under, and been mentored by, renowned artist and educator Ben Jones (b. 1941).
About the Morris Museum’s collections of African Art
Collecting objects of global cultural heritage has been part of the Morris Museum’s practice since at least 1920. Notable collections of world art in the Museum’s care include those of Ralph G. Packard, Jan Moline, Maitland Lee Griggs, Marilyn and E. H. Hoffman, Wolfgang and Maria Jochle, Lorin Nathan, and Robert Schultz. Most of these collectors were actively acquiring objects in the late 19th through the first two thirds of the 20th centuries. The passport masks, for example, are part of a nearly 100-object collection of Africana donated to the Museum in 1983 by an anonymous donor.
Morris Museum objects from Africa were made predominantly by people from many different cultures living in the continent’s sub-Saharan regions. Their original uses range from utilitarian and everyday (e.g. tools, clothing, weapons, and jewelry) to ceremonial and religious (e.g. masks, talismans, fetishes). Materials range from metal and stone to organic substances including leather, wood, feathers, shell, and hair.
About the Morris Museum
The Morris Museum—founded in 1913 and located on 8.5 acres in Morris Township, New Jersey, since the mid-1960s—draws visitors across the region to its dynamic and acclaimed art exhibitions program and performing arts events. Its 45,000+ object collection of art and material culture from around the world joins the art of our time in displays throughout the Museum’s purpose-built spaces and within the historic Twin Oaks mansion, designed by McKim, Mead & White.
