Foundation for Contemporary Arts

William E. Jones

Lives in Los Angeles, CA

Born 1962, Canton, OH

Artist, Filmmaker

My education prepared me first to be a film theorist (a career to which I was ill-suited), then to be an experimental filmmaker producing long essay films, a practice that nearly bankrupted me. In recent years, I have returned to my original artistic goals and now consider myself an artist who shows mainly in galleries, but who also writes. I currently make movies on an extreme economy of means by manipulating and recontextualizing appropriated images. I also make collages and documentary photographs realized as digital prints. Among my favorite works are the artist's books I have been publishing since 2006.

Recently, I have become interested in working in the essay form again, and I wish to concentrate on a new writing project. After years of producing many short films, most of them silent, I would now like to produce a longer film based upon a script. The project concerns my father, recently deceased, and the Cold War-two subjects inseparable in my mind. The work will be an unconventional autobiography imagined at a tangent to its subject, narrated by my father from beyond the grave and making use of historical images found in the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

1990 M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts

1985 B.A., Yale University

Instructor, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2011 William E. Jones, Upstairs at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, UK

2011 William E. Jones, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2011 "Killed" and Resurrected, Australian Film Museum, Vienna, Austria

2010 Alternative Version, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, Italy

2010 Punctured, Andrew Roth Gallery, New York, NY

2010 Retrospective, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY

2009 William E. Jones, Swallow Street, London, UK

2009 William E. Jones, ar/ge kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano, Italy

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2011 After Images, Jewish Museum, Brussels, Belgium

2011 101 Collection: Route 2 Undisclosed Destination, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA

2010 The Artist's Museum, MoCA, Los Angeles, CA

2010 Nachleben, Goethe Institut Wyoming Building, New York, NY

2009 Beg, Borrow and Steal, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL

2008 Records Played Backward, The Modern Institue, Glasgow, UK

2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

2007 BodyPolitcX, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2006 Having Been Described in Words, Orchard, New York, NY

SELECTED GRANTS, HONORS AND AWARDS

2006 J. Paul Getty Trust Fund Fellowship, California Community Foundation

2004 City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department (COLA) Grant

1999 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship

1997 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award