She is the daughter of Virginia Sweetnam Jones and Edward E. Jones, a Princeton Psychology professor. She studied art history as an undergraduate at Harvard University and completed her M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1991. Her dissertation was later turned into a published book, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp. On March 7, 1987 Jones married Anthony Sherin, a film editor. They divorced in 2005. In 2007, Jones married artist Paul Donald. She has two children, Evan and Vita, from her first marriage. Jones currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Career
After completing her PhD, Jones left Los Angeles to teach at universities throughout the United States as well as in Manchester, England and Montreal, Canada. She has taught art history at University of California, Riverside and the University of Manchester, where she served as the Pilkington Chair of the department. She also served as the Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montreal and has held visiting professorships at Maine College of Art, Texas Christian University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Washington University, St. Louis. She is currently the Robert A. Day Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at the USC RoskiSchool of Art and Design, where she also serves as Vice Dean of Research. She is affiliated faculty in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. In addition to her work in academia, Jones has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History at the Hammer Museum, The Politics of Difference: Artists Explore Issues of Identity at the Chandler Art Museum at University of California, Riverside, and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also independently organizing a retrospective exhibition on the work of American performance artist Ron Athey. Through art history, Amelia Jones has spoken out against cultural biases related to gender and race during her career. She has challenged most authoritative voices for insistently promoting a straight white-male perspective. Her work is committed to representing artists who are women, queer or people of color. Jones is a revolutionary art historian who has conquered boundaries that have been hindering the artists that make up the world of art history.
Books
Jones is the author and editor of numerous books and anthologies on art history, performance studies, queer studies, and visual culture. She currently serves as co-editor of the Manchester University Press series Rethinking Art's Histories with Martha Meskimmon. Jones has edited A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, a collection of art history and criticism by contributors who write on such topics as technology, formalism, public space, diasporas, culture wars, the avant-garde, and the society of the spectacle. She has also edited The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, the seven part work of Provocations, Representation, Difference, Disciplines/Strategies, Mass culture/Media interventions, Body, and Technology. The following is a selection of works written or edited by Amelia Jones:
Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2012.
"Sexuality" London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014.
Silver, Erin and Amelia Jones. Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
Awards
Throughout Amelia Jones' career she has been recognized for her valuable contributions to the art world. She has also been recognized for her progressive work with feminist ideas. She was award the Distinguished Feminist Award in 2015 which honors art, scholarship or advocacy advancing the cause of equality for women in the arts. Previous winners of the award include The Guerrilla Girls, Lucy Lippard and Lorraine O’Grady. Jones received a few awards prior that acknowledge her success as an art historian and feminist activist. Awards Amelia Jones received:
