Seitu K. Jones explores soil, culture and African American history in solo show

Collard greens appear throughout the new Seitu K. Jones solo exhibition at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, “The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements.” The plant emerges in charcoal drawings, paintings and a sculptural form contained inside a hand-carved box made from Minnesota basswood. The hearty green acts as a connecting cord in the exhibition.

“I keep coming back to collard greens as a way of accessing Southern cuisine,” Jones said. “And then exploring these African American culinary traditions — this line that connects us all to Africa.”

The greens invite an exploration of Jones’ relationship with the soil, culture and history. Along with portraiture and an exploration of West African cultural motifs, the exhibition — running Oct. 22 through July 25, with an opening reception on Oct. 29 — offers a chance to see Jones’ technical range. 

A family history in art, agriculture

Jones is a fourth-generation Minnesotan. After un-enslaving himself, his great-grandfather joined the Union Army and fought in the Civil War. He eventually moved to Red Wing, where he became a porter for the St. James Hotel and earned enough money to start a farm.

“They rented land in Rochester, and that’s where my grandmother was born,” Jones said. Jones’ grandmother moved to Old Rondo in St. Paul over 100 years ago and turned her backyard into a farm.

“I can clearly still remember the plum trees that were there,” Jones said, noting the strangeness of a woman whose father was forced into slavery choosing to work the land herself.

He also remembers being in his grandmother’s kitchen on Fuller Avenue, “listening to her and my aunties fussing back and forth at each other in that kitchen,” he said.

Jones’ interest in growing things and art have always been connected. His undergraduate degree is in landscape design from the University of Minnesota’s School of Agriculture, and his graduate degree is in environmental history. He is also a co-founder of Frogtown Farms, a nonprofit food justice organization centered around a community farm.

Jones is perhaps best known for his public art, including the large-scale community meals he’s organized in the Twin Cities and around the country. His “Shadows of the Crossroads” relief sculptures, made with long-time friend and collaborator Ta-coumba T. Aiken, joined the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2019. His ocean-blue portraits of George Floyd, placed around Twin Cities streets during the uprising of 2020 that followed Floyd’s murder, were an important piece of the artistic response to that moment.

Preserving the work of Black artists

Jones’ work is known nationally, and it has been collected by institutions including the Walker. He has won awards including the prestigious ArtPrize Grand Juried Prize, a Joyce Award. and local honors. So it’s fairly shocking that the show opening at the M is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. The delayed recognition speaks to the glaring gaps in our culture for Black artists, an issue Jones has spent a lifetime attempting to address.

“I’ve lost so many friends, friends, collaborators, mentors, people who I looked up to, who passed on and whose work has literally ended up in a dumpster, or whose legacies are not remembered,” Jones said. “Unfortunately, what happens more and more to African American artists and Indigenous artists and other artists of color is that after a generation, their memories are gone.”

Through his archival initiative, The Black Gate, Jones works to preserve the work of Black artists before they are forgotten — including his own. 

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For “The Smell of Earth,” Jones worked closely with archivists Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Alexandra Nicome, who have been attending to his archives for a number of years. 

According to Nicome, the works on paper included in the exhibition were all chosen from rolled-up tubes in Jones’ archive space. After coming across a number of works featuring collard greens, the archivists thought, “Wow, this is work that most people don’t associate with Seitu, and probably haven’t seen and might not know that he has this sort of like technical virtuosity and across media,” Nicome said.

One piece features an incredibly detailed rendering of a germinating collard, captured at each stage of its growth.

“We were interested in showing these works where Seitu had an opportunity to slow down and really work at a more intimate scale,” Nicome said.

The show has also been an opportunity for the museum to repair some of Jones’ work.  One painting on paper, “Sabian,” (1997), featuring his cousin’s son ice fishing, had a rip that the M’s team repaired for the show.

Besides the main gallery room, additional pieces are spread throughout the museum in conversation with other Minnesota artists of the past and present. Jones said it’s been great to walk down the gallery at the M and see his heroes like George Morrison and his friend Ta-Coumba Aiken. His own choices include an undated, unfinished painting by his father of Jones as a small child. The artistry shows training and a gifted hand, but its unfinished state reflects a life of full-time labor and responsibilities.

Self-portraits make up a significant portion of the exhibition, in which Jones’ own image stands in for the Black experience through history.

“I’ve been doing these portraits of myself, placing myself in the situations that many African American men have found themselves in over the last 400 years of our American experience,” he said.

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At times, he places himself in states of transcendence, like a series of large-scale charcoal drawings that depict a kind of enlightenment. Located in the M’s atrium, visible from the skyway, the works nod to Jones’ public art practice. They depict figures who seem to be floating serenely in the air.

Other positions are more painful, like “Street Scene (Self portrait)” a drawing showing Jones with his eyes closed, lying in the street. Nearby, a pair of boots can be seen, though it’s not clear who the boots belong to. The work alludes to the prevalence of street violence as well as police brutality that disproportionately impacts Black men. Another piece shows dangling feet against the beauty of the surrounding landscape, contrasting the legacy of lynching in American history with the beauty of the natural world.

“The Smell of Earth” asserts Jones’ prominence as an artist with strong vision as well as giftedness in a variety of forms. The exhibition throws an emotional punch, even as it reveals personal moments, family intimacy and a soulful homage to the land. 

“The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements” runs Oct. 22–July 25, 2027, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, 350 Robert St N, St. Paul (Free). More information here. 

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