Julian Jamaal Jones
LET ME CALM DOWN

November 14, 2025 — January 18, 2026

COMPANION presents LET ME CALM DOWN, a solo exhibition by Julian Jamaal Jones, comprising small drawings and his distinctive, abstract quilts. The exhibition is Jones’ fifth solo project this year and borrows its name from a track on Nicki Minaj’s 2023 album, Pink Friday 2. It marks a pause and questions whether calm itself can become radical.

LET ME CALM DOWN | Opening Reception
Friday, November 14th | 6 — 10pm

FOR A MOMENT | Family-style Dinner with Julian Jamaal Jones and chef Alan Sternberg
Tuesday, January 13th | 6 — 9pm
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BEFORE WE MOVE ON | Closing Reception and Artist Talk
Sunday, January 18th | 1 — 4pm

Let Me Calm Down borrows its name from a track on Nicki Minaj’s 2023 album, Pink Friday 2. Jones transforms the energy of the phrase into a declaration of his own. For him, “calming down” is not a retreat into silence but a vital demand: a refusal to be consumed by political exhaustion, the barriers of the art world, and the weight of personal frustration. It is a pause taken on his own terms, one that insists on dignity, clarity, and survival. 

This exhibition gathers quilts that exist at the intersection of tension and release. Pattern, color, and layered abstraction embody the energy of hip-hop—its raw honesty, its lyrical defiance, and its ability to flip anger into rhythm. The quilts carry a visual beat: stitched lines echo soundwaves, blocks of color clash and harmonize like verses in a song, and pieced-together fragments form a full narrative. In these works, cloth becomes a language, coded with memories, burdens, and hopes that refuse to be erased. 

Jones’s practice is deeply personal, yet it speaks broadly to collective experience. The works reflect his own wrestling with systemic inequities in the art industry, the exhaustion of navigating politics that devalue Black voices, and the intimate frustrations of daily life. They continue a long lineage of Black cultural production—from the quilting traditions of Gee’s Bend to the sonic innovation of hip-hop—that transforms struggle into testimony. 

Through Let Me Calm Down, Jones asks what it means to hold space for breath in a world that insists on urgency. Can calm itself become radical? Can frustration be reshaped into beauty without losing its edge? His refusal to diminish anger or hide exhaustion proposes stillness and fury, softness and resistance, coexist in the same frame—stitched into the very fabric of survival.

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