Samuel Levi Jones creates minimalist abstractions—paintings, objects, and installations—from deconstructed art, law, medical, and history books. These painterly compositions on canvas are comprised of desecrated book covers sewn together into collage-like patterns, and infused with swathes of pulp, while loose threads and weathered cardboard binding reveal the process of deconstruction. Inspired by questions of authority, representation, and recorded history, Jones’s practice centers on physically undoing these volumes of information, only to re-arrange, re-purpose, and re-imagine the materiality into grid-like fields of color and texture. By desecrating historical material and re-imagining new works, he explores the framing of power structures and struggles between exclusion and equality.

Drawing from specific sources, each piece is imbued with not only the history of the book covers and the subject matter of the book material but also the structures of power which produce and perpetuate inequities. Jones has been digesting, skinning, and processing the form and material of academic reference books. This critique is conducted physically: Jones separates the fabric book covers from their cardboard supports, their binding, and their contents. The covers are collaged onto canvas, rendering compositions that evoke the peeling surfaces and stacked construction of vernacular urban architectures and the vulnerable transparency of human skin, without leaving any question that these are paintings made from books. The recognizable fabric of books, weathered and stained, loose threads, and suggestions of institutional and personal ex libris remain while the content of the books is discarded and withheld from the viewer.

Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, he earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from Taylor University, B.F.A. from Herron School of Art and Design (2009), and M.F.A. in Studio Art from Mills College (2012). Museum exhibitions include The Empire is Falling at The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indiana; Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Guiffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, IL; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem. His work can be found in museum and public collections such as the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin – Madison, WI; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Fl; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. He is the recipient of the 2014 Joyce Alexander Wein artist prize awarded by the Studio Museum in Harlem.