Jones (1908–1998) was a native of Boston, Mass., where she received her early artistic training in drawing, painting, and textile design in the 1920s. She combated sexism and racism to win numerous awards and scholarships, and started the art program for African-American students at the Palmer Institute in Sedalia, N.C., in 1928. She was recruited to teach at Howard University in 1930, where she taught a total of 2,500 students by her retirement in 1977.

Jones, who often sought to avoid racial bias by shipping her work to museums and galleries rather than presenting it in person, broke barriers for African-American artists. One example occurred in 1941, when she asked a white friend to drop off her submission to a competition at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. At that time the gallery did not accept submissions by African-Americans, but Jones became the first African-American artist to win the coveted Robert Woods Bliss Prize for Landscape. Other venues that increasingly displayed her art included the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, and many others.

Jones won scholarships to study at renowned art schools such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Académie Julian in Paris, France. On sabbatical in 1937-1938 in France, she met prominent African-American artists who had relocated to Europe and had achieved financial success and respect. Her time there also exposed her to traditional African masks and sculptures displayed in Parisian galleries and museums. Jones later combined these objects with her formal painting style and experience in textile design to create her own vibrant and expressive technique.

Jones returned to Howard University in 1938. She began to create works that replaced European artistic conventions with ones that represented the African-American heritage and experience. Jones’s variations on African themes were further strengthened after her marriage to Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noël in 1953, when trips to Haiti inspired her with its people, landscape, traditions, and bustle. Jones felt that Haiti "never cut its ties to Mother Africa," and some of her most creative works were painted during her time there.

A grant from Howard University in 1970 to study contemporary African art allowed Jones to travel to 11 African nations, her first trip to the continent. She saw the masks and ceremonial artifacts she had first viewed in the Parisian galleries nearly 30 years before in the context of the rituals for which they were originally created. The resulting paintings fused her own highly developed aesthetic sensibility with these authentic symbols to create the most fully realized celebrations of African heritage of her career.