[3] Jones worked in his native St. Louis, Missouri, until age 27, then spent the rest of his life based in or around New York City.

[3] In 1933, ten patrons led by Elizabeth Green in St. Louis formed a "Joe Jones Club" and financed his travel to the artists' colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

While some critics have considered his early paintings as typical of the Midwestern Regionalist style exemplified by the work of Thomas Hart Benton, others have stated that he was in fact "anti-Regionalist".

Under a cloudy dark sky, wheat dominates the perspective with the farmers providing a great deal of motion.

Another New Deal mural entitled Men and Wheat was painted by Joe Jones in 1940, followed by Husking Corn in 1941 for the Dexter, Missouri, post office, Turning a Corner in 1939 in Anthony, Kansas and Threshing in Magnolia, Arkansas, in 1938.

Participating were Louis Bunin (puppeteer), Stuart Davis (American Artists' Congress), Joseph Freeman (literary critic and founder of the New Masses), William Gropper (fellow painter and cartoonist), Jerome Klein (critic of the New York Post, and Roger Baldwin (chairman).

The first show included the paintings We Demand, Garbage Eaters, Demonstration, The New Deal, and the shocking American Justice.

The paintings on exhibit showed "delicately colored, wiry-lined pictures of beaches, towns, and harbors... without a park of sorrow or anger in them."

Jones (then, 42 years old) did not want to "sit on top of a reputation," had lost interest in Communism, and removed "class war" from his paintings.

He became interested in delicate lines and low-toned colors, a reaction against "the preoccupation with light and shade that has victimized Western art since the Renaissance."

Of his early, radical work, the magazine cited American Justice with the corpse of a half-naked black woman who has been raped and lynched against a background of quietly chatting Ku Klux Klansmen.

For his later, "softer Japanese-like style," it cited his December 1961 cover and a mural of Boston Harbor in the dining salon of the SS Independence.

[29] In 2010 a monograph entitled Joe Jones: Radical Painter of the American Scene was published by the Saint Louis Art Museum.