Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist, curator, and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland, where she has lived on the same block her entire life. Her interdisciplinary practice is deeply rooted in place—usually within the context of the U.S. South—and is focused on honoring and celebrating everyday people by lifting up their stories. Ashley is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She earned an MFA in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD in American Studies from University of Maryland College Park. As an artist, she has exhibited widely and her work is represented in several prominent collections. Her research is being archived as “the Ashley Minner Collection” in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her most recent project is a reconstruction of East Baltimore’s historic American Indian “reservation.” A monograph on the same is forthcoming. Ashley is currently employed as Assistant Curator for History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Jill Fannon