Seitu K. Jones has his first solo museum exhibition at 75. “The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements” opens Thursday at the Minnesota Museum of American Art on Robert Street North in St. Paul and runs until July 25. Admission is free, and there is a reception on Oct. 29 from 6 to 8 p.m.
“Why did it take so long for a bald-headed Black man to get a solo show?” Jones asks.
The show covers 40 years of studio work: drawings, large-scale paintings and ceramics, alongside journal entries, letters and newspaper clippings. The drawings, running from the 1980s to the present, had largely stayed rolled up or in flat files at his house. The curators, Alexandra Nicome and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, have worked with him since 2020.
“It feels like the whole exhibition came out of the archives,” Nicome said.
What the Twin Cities already know Jones for is the work that does not fit in a flat file. In 2014 he staged “Create: The Community Meal,” seating more than 2,000 people at a table that ran half a mile down Victoria Street in Frogtown. In 2013 he co-founded Frogtown Farm, five acres of urban farmland, with his wife, the poet Soyini Guyton; it produced more than 10,000 pounds of food last year. His murals and installations are spread across the cities.
The studio work has its own line through it. Jones first travelled to West Africa in 1974. The exhibition includes self-portraits that start with a charcoal drawing from 2016, pass through a 2020 piece titled “Strange Fruit,” and narrow by 2021 to his eyes alone.
Davu Seru, an artist and a curator at the University of Minnesota’s Givens Collection of African American Literature, put the thread in Jones’s work plainly: “Humanity is rooted in your connection to others.”
Jones offered his own version of the lesson. “Take risks, be persistent and never, never, ever be ashamed or embarrassed or hold back on your worldview,” he said.
The museum is open Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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