Annette's profile
Annette Wilson Jones received her BFA from MICA in 1978 and has continued to work as an artist, teaching, and creating community-based public art. In 1980, she was hired by Beautiful Walls for Baltimore as a full-time muralist. In 1986: her work was chosen by New Museum Curator Brian Wallis for the five person show, "Sweet Land of Liberty", at School 33 Arts Center; was featured and awarded an honorarium by Baltimore City Paper for her drawing, "Self-portrait as St. Sebastian, Tattooed on My Husband’s Back"; and gave birth to her first child.
Throughout the past forty years, her work has been included in visual arts exhibitions throughout Maryland and in shows that traveled to: DC, PA, NM, NY, NC, VA and Lund, Sweden. Her work was selected, in 2019, for the Second Tri-Annual Maryland State Artist Registry Juried Exhibition and the 31st National Drawing & Print Exhibition for which Juror Doreen Bolger awarded a Purchase Prize; this allowed the work to be added to the permanent collection of the Gormely Gallery at Notre Dame of Maryland University. She was awarded a 2023 grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, through the Grants For Artists program.
The work in this portfolio reflects a long-time interest in palimpsests, the layering of text and images over other, older texts and images. As an artist with a life-long hearing impairment, palimpsests are used as a visual representation of hearing loss: text is hidden within the drawing, appearing and disappearing under various conditions.
Recent work includes paintings on paper, made from “weed” trees and plants, of objects found in “vacant” lots in Baltimore City — lots that once held homes full of life and love and joy, and sometimes grief, and trauma and death. Those homes are gone but bits of pottery and bricks rise to the surface and give evidence of the beauty contained within the not-so-vacant lots. Inky cap mushrooms grow in one lot, a pack of Newports lies scattered in the mud (a small tragedy for someone) — new stories interwoven with the old.
Older work includes: paper mâché masks using newspaper images and articles; drawings that incorporate an antique Remington typewriter, text from old books, rubbings of tree stumps, historic wall coverings, and antique wooden blocks used in advertisements and fabric printing. The subject matter of these works most often address issues such as climate change and other concerns for our planet; violence and inequity in our communities; healing and positive change that must take place and, recently, the history of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands — the latter of which encompasses the previous issues.
Those subjects are "heavy" but not intended to be heavy-handed or focus too heavily on what has happened in the past — instead focusing on what can be done to work together now and in the future. Humor is used, not to "make light" of any specific issue but in order to bring light to the subject matter, illuminating what might be difficult to see, allowing time for the eyes to adjust.
