Seitu K. Jones has spent much of his life making art that brings people together. For decades, he has fed the Twin Cities with murals, public installations, community meals and a 5-acre urban farm in St. Paul.
While Jones’ public art has become part of the Minnesota landscape, much of his studio work remained rolled up or tucked away in the basement of his St. Paul home.
Now, at 75, Jones is bringing some of it out for his first solo museum exhibition, “The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements.” The show at the Minnesota Museum of American Art will span 40 years of studio work, including drawings, large-scale paintings and ceramics, alongside journal entries, letters and newspaper clippings that trace his life as a Black artist in Minnesota.
Curators Alexandra Nicome and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski have been working with Jones since 2020 to organize and preserve much of this work.
“It feels like the whole exhibition came out of the archives,” Nicome said. “One of the things we were struck by were some really beautiful drawings that were just rolled up or put in the flat file. It’s a type of work that people don’t really associate with his practice because he’s so much better known for his public artwork in the Twin Cities.”
“He has been such an important guide and mentor for artists coming up in a field that is not always the most hospitable,” she added. “I hope people walk away thinking more flexibly about Seitu and his practice.”
Jones is pleased to have a museum exhibition devoted to his work. But after decades of making art across the Twin Cities, he is also a little curious about the wait.
“Why did it take so long for a bald-headed Black man to get a solo show?” he asked.
Portraits of Ubuntu
Visitors meet Jones first through a series of self-portraits in the exhibition.
In a charcoal drawing from 2016, he lies on the pavement, eyes closed, beside the leather boots of an unidentified person standing over him. In “Strange Fruit,” from 2020, his feet hang suspended from a tree, whereas in “Roots,” those same feet stand firmly in the soil of a plentiful harvest of collards — a plant Jones has spent more than three decades exploring as a symbol of Black survival.
By 2021, during the isolation of the pandemic, Jones had narrowed his self-portrait down to just his eyes looking back at the viewer.
Davu Seru, artist and curator at the University of Minnesota’s Givens Collection of African American Literature, sees the African concept of ubuntu (“I am because we are”) running through his self-portraiture.
“Humanity is rooted in your connection to others,” Seru said. His work reflects “an individual who knows that he would not exist but for his community.”
Seru, who has known Jones since the 1990s, is collaborating with him on a book about his life and work, set for publication by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. The book aims to encourage other artists to preserve and archive their work.
“It’s been a great privilege and joy to get into his archive and start piecing together a story through the generations,” Seru said. “He’s made the state richer by his presence.”
The Smell of Earth
In photographs from the 1950s, young Jones poses in front of his grandmother’s yard. He doesn’t remember the garden plots behind him but he remembers the plum tree she planted.
His grandmother grew up on a farm in Rochester, Minnesota, purchased by her father — a formerly enslaved man who escaped a plantation in Kentucky during the Civil War. She carried those roots to her home in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood.
“This has tied me to the Earth in one way or another and was a big influence on me,” Jones said.
While studying landscape design and environmental history at the University of Minnesota, Jones looked to the work of George Washington Carver, an agricultural scientist who encouraged Black farmers to grow crops beyond cotton. Carver was also a painter who merged art and agriculture through botanical illustrations.
“I had an auntie that used to call me ‘Little George Washington Carver’ and I just hated it,” Jones said. “I thought, ‘Why would I want to be like that old bald-headed man?’ But here I am, that old bald-headed man.”
Jones’ interest in agriculture deepened in 1974, when he traveled to West Africa for the first time. In his journal, he captured the experience of arriving: “The smell of earth and freshness was there … New vegetation, new sky. And it seems like the sky is touching green in any direction.”
With reverence for his homeland in Minnesota, Jones and his wife, poet Soyini Guyton co-founded Frogtown Farm in 2013.
“We were these crazy artists that had this vision to establish a functional farm on a vacant plot of land,” Jones said.
In 2025, the urban farm produced more than 10,000 pounds of food for local families and food shelves in St. Paul.
“I encourage folks to come visit the farm created by and visualized by artists who thought about this farm as a way of interacting with the land — not trying to conquer it, but working with the land to make it a work of art,” he said.
In 2014, Jones invited more than 2,000 people for dinner on Victoria Street in St. Paul. The table stretched half a mile through Frogtown, bringing neighbors together over dishes prepared by local farmers and chefs. The multimedia art project, called “Create: The Community Meal,” was an occasion to raise questions about food equity in the state.
“I tell folks all the time, ‘I stole this idea,’” Jones said. “We have only been having meals and over-the-dinner conversations for the last 100,000 years.”
The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to look at the breadth of Jones’ studio practice, revealing the work he created alongside his many public and community projects. Jones hopes other artists feel just as free to follow their ideas wherever they lead.
“Take risks, be persistent and never, never, ever be ashamed or embarrassed or hold back on your worldview,” Jones said.
Date: Thursday, Oct. 22 through July 25
Time: Opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 29. Regular gallery hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.
Location: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 350 Robert St. N., St. Paul
Cost: Free
For more information: Visit mmaa.org/the-smell-of-earth-the-work-of-seitu-k-jones
