Most people in the Twin Cities know Seitu K. Jones without necessarily knowing his name. His more than 40 large-scale public artworks shape streets, parks and transit stops across Minneapolis and St. Paul. Now the Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M) in St. Paul is giving the multidisciplinary artist his first major solo museum exhibition: The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements, which celebrated its opening reception on 29 October and runs until 25 July 2027.
“Tending the soil of community”
Jones describes his practice as “tending the soil of community”, and he means it literally as well as figuratively. He is a master gardener, a food justice advocate, a historian and an archivist. His celebrated Community Meal events, in which hundreds of neighbours sit at one long table to share food and conversation, have become a model for how art can create civic life rather than simply decorate it.
The studio behind the public work
The exhibition deliberately turns away from the famous commissions to look at his less-examined studio practice: drawings, paintings, sculpture and design that honour African American culture, symbolism, history and ancestral knowledge. These are shown alongside objects and ephemera from Jones’s extensive personal archive, which documents four decades of life as a Black artist in Minnesota.
True to his collaborative approach, Jones selected the works together with curators Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Alexandra Nicome. Rather than a strict chronology, the show is organised by medium, linking what he makes to how he makes it — fitting for an artist whose title points to the four elements and to the very material he works with in his garden.
Why it matters
Museum surveys of artists who have spent their careers in public space are still rare. Their work is everywhere and therefore easy to overlook; their archives often sit in basements rather than collections. By bringing Jones’s studio work and records into the galleries — and by emphasising legacy and knowledge-sharing for African American artists — the M makes a quiet but important argument: that local, community-rooted practice deserves the same institutional attention as international stars.
With a run of almost nine months, the exhibition has time to do what Jones does best: gather people, slowly, around shared ground.