Viewpoints | Episode 4 | Samuel Levi Jones, Pamela Joyner

Samuel Levi Jones b. 1978, United States Follow +

‘San Francisco-based collector Pamela Joyner, together with her husband Fred Giuffrida, has amassed what has been called the most important collection of African American art in private hands,’ says Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection includes several works by Samuel Levi Jones, who ‘unmakes and remakes objects to question their moral and ethical implications,’ Sabbatino says.

Recorded in Chicago during the week of EXPO Chicago 2019, Jones and Joyner’s conversation centres on the formation of their fruitful artist-collector relationship and the background of Jones’s pulping and repurposing of authoritative textbooks, plus their shared interest in deconstructing the cultural and political systems at work in society.

‘When I make the work, I deconstruct it, thinking about how the system should be deconstructed and remade, rather than doing the same thing and continuing to expect a new result,’ Jones says.

When Jones admits his perspective could be seen in a pessimistic light, Joyner disagrees: ‘I don’t think of you as a pessimistic person at all. I think of you as something like a sponge: You absorb the environment, and then you do the best of what the best artists do...You reframe important questions in a way that we might have a prospect for coming to better and clearer answers.”