Alex A. Jones
2024 Grant for Writing on Sculpture
The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation’s inaugural Grant for Writing on Sculpture has been awarded to Alex A. Jones.
Jones is a gifted storyteller and historian, with a discerning eye and an ability to engage the reader both intellectually and emotionally. Her writing is grounded in research and experience. She champions sculpture’s potential to respond to ecological emergency, and to foster healing. Her proposal, called “The Aesthetics of Regeneration: Bending the L.A. River,” is for a long-form essay that will examine Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio’s Bending the River, placing this elaborate and ambitious ecological sculpture, one that implicates “an entire system of human and nonhuman actors,” within the contexts of Los Angeles, art and activism, and regenerative art practice. With the project’s ‘sculptural core,” a 47-foot reservoir or “mother well,” buried underground, and much of the project’s development dependent on behind-the-scenes negotiations with and between the public and private sectors, Jones will illuminate the unseen forms and processes involved in bringing Bending the River to fruition and make them part of her story. The Silver Foundation is proud to support a writer with a love of language and sculpture and an independent point of view.
Alex A. Jones is a writer on art, ecology, and the occult. In 2022 she received the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award for her project “Art and Ecology in the Third Millennium.” She is a co-creator of collaborative projects including the Queer Ecologies Research Collective and the film collective VIROSA. Jones has published art criticism with the Brooklyn Rail and delivered numerous workshops and presentations on topics including environmental history, cosmic horror, queer ecology, interspecies dialogues, and expanded cinema. As a freelance researcher she has worked on curatorial projects for the New York Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong, and Mildred’s Lane. She studied art history, theory, and criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
The mission of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation is to protect, preserve and expand the legacy of Jonathan Silver. Silver (1937-1992) was a sculptor, art historian, writer and teacher. Fiercely independent, at times iconoclastic, with an analytical intensity and operative imagination, he was passionately interested in the history of sculpture and in the ways in which, over centuries and across cultures, sculpture has commanded attention and inspired powerful visions and moving and at times wild, even dangerous, thought and behavior.
The Silver Foundation began its grant program in 2024. It will alternate grants for writing on sculpture and grants for sculpture. Its 2025 grant will be for sculpture. Guidelines will appear on the foundation’s website by February 1. The deadline for applications will be May 31, 2025.
For further information, please contact info@jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation.org.