Rooftop barflies frittered away a sunny Saturday afternoon last month from the fifth-floor terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their rosé-tinted views of the Midtown skyline accompanied by the discordantly sober minimalism of Jennie C. Jones’s Ensemble. Resembling a trio of stringed instruments, the installation provides a coda, for the time being, to the Met’s buzzy annual Roof Garden commission, which has served site-specific summer fun to the museumgoing public since 2013. (Demolition of the patio will soon commence in preparation for the forthcoming Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, slated to open—with new and improved outdoor space—in 2030.)
Jones’s powdered-aluminum sculptures are a moody burgundy, accented with a sanguine hue she has jokingly denominated “public-art red.” The tallest of the three works, the so-called Aeolian harp, echoes the gangly skyscrapers visible in the cracks between its vertical components. Another structure is influenced by a single-stringed folk instrument known as a diddley bow; it features two slender, leaning polyhe…