Juniper Jones treats the archive as material—staining, altering, and abstracting photographs to question what remains. Their work positions Black family archives and domestic space as sites of knowledge production, where memory is lived, reshaped, and embodied.

Selected works

About

“I color myself in with stains because… something had to be spilled—shared, spared, and labored over—in order for me to retain a working image of myself.” — Juniper Jones

Juniper Jones (b. 1997, Detroit, Michigan) positions domestic artifacts as vestiges of Black collectivity & ancestral record keeping. Sourcing inspiration from familial archives & historic retellings, Jones’ work includes painting, performance, video, audio, sculpture, and installation.

Motivated by connecting traces of Black convening to matters of the domestic, Jones’s paintings reinterpret Black family photographs and memories as stains on domestic textiles like pillowcases and bedsheets. This practice utilizes water-soluble media like crayons and ink paired with corrosive elements like salt and bleach to embed an image into fibers.

A central aspect of their practice reframes the “stain” as both an imperfect artifact of presence and a fugitive symbol resisting erasure. This, in turn, allows Jones to reorient moments of Black collectivity like cabarets and cookouts to be viewed as sites that alchemize stains into language.

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