Seitu K. Jones is 75 years old and has spent four decades shaping the look of the Twin Cities. This week he got something no museum had given him: a solo show of his own.
“The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements” opened Thursday at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul. It runs through July 25, 2027, and admission is free. An opening reception is set for Oct. 29, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Jones is best known for large public projects, more than 40 of them, and for community meals that brought thousands of people to one table. The museum is showing something else: his studio work, much of it never exhibited publicly. Drawings, large paintings, ceramics, journals and letters fill the galleries, alongside archival material documenting his life as a Black artist in Minnesota.
Jones put the question himself, as Sahan Journal reported: “Why did it take so long for a bald-headed Black man to get a solo show?”
Work that lives in the soil
The curators, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Alexandra Nicome, describe a practice that “explores the relationship between Midwestern landscapes and his body, family history, and distant ancestors through charcoal, pigment, and clay.”
Jones is also a master gardener and food justice advocate. In 2013 he co-founded Frogtown Farm in St. Paul, which according to Sahan Journal produced more than 10,000 pounds of food in 2025. In 2014 he staged “Create: The Community Meal,” a table that hosted more than 2,000 people.
He has described his mission this way: “I am to not only support the community where my work lives, but to channel the love and contributions of the community itself.”
The show is free to see Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 350 Robert St. N. A biography of Jones by Davu Seru is forthcoming from Minnesota Historical Society Press.
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