African, American: The Art of Troy Jones

Hunterdon Art Museum is pleased to present African, American: The Art of Troy Jones, on view September 27, 2026 through January 10, 2027. Curated by Ray-Anthony Eddie, the exhibition features Jones’s powerful paintings exploring African American identity, cultural inheritance, visibility, and belonging through contemporary portraiture and the visual language of African masking traditions.

In the words of the exhibition’s curator: “Look closely at the figures in this exhibition and you will find two things layered into every face: a contemporary American life, and an African mask that has never let go of it.” Jones paints these two histories simultaneously. His figures embody the confidence, style, and spirit of contemporary life, while the masks evoke an inheritance that reaches back before the country itself—carrying ideas of protection, memory, identity, and cultural continuity. At the center of the exhibition is a question about visibility and cultural authorship.

African Americans have profoundly shaped American and global culture through music, style, language, labor, and artistic expression, while their contributions have often gone uncredited or been excluded from dominant narratives of American history. The curator describes the masks as central to Jones’s investigation of this paradox: “They reveal and they conceal, protect and testify.” The exhibition also asserts African American belonging as an essential part of the American story. Black labor, creativity, and cultural production have been fundamental to the nation’s development. Rather than positioning African heritage and American identity as opposing ideas, Jones presents them as inseparable dimensions of a shared history.