Kelly Kristin Jones employs photography as both a subject and a tool to investigate how the medium shapes racialized and exclusionary historical narratives. Recognizing that representation plays a critical role in shaping culture, Jones focuses on the lasting cultural and political power of print media and photographic archives. Her work involves collecting, altering, and recontextualizing a wide range of visual materials—including contemporary media, historical archives, personal photographs, and photographic tools. Rather than treating photographs as static records or photography as objective documentation, Jones challenges the medium’s authority by creating space for dialogue and dissent. Her approach positions photography as an active participant in the construction—and deconstruction—of cultural memory. In doing so, Jones transforms photography into a site of resistance and reimagining through laborious hand-erasing, scratching, and manipulating images to look beneath the narrative surface and propose a site for new histories. Kelly Kristin Jones’s work ultimately reframes the photographic archive as a living, contested space where meaning is constantly in flux and open to reinterpretation.
CV available here.
Kelly Kristin Jones was raised on the West Side of Chicago and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships including a 2024 Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. She was a featured artist in the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the 2023 Chicago Humanities Festival.
kelly@kellykristinjones.com