Seitu Ken Jones

Jan 22

Site: Bus Shelter near Metropolitan Sewer District

Curator: James McAnally and Dream the Combine

For Counterpublic 2023, Seitu Ken Jones seeds a new iteration of his ongoing collard greens series across the Metro bus system, weaving family recipes and dispersed designs along the Jefferson Avenue corridor. Inspired by the ways in which food is a primary means of communal gathering and of passing along knowledge and ancestral meaning in Black culture, the project acts as a distribution system, circulating the greens through the city and transmitting recipes to new households.

The project has roots in the artist’s aunt’s garden in Meacham Park, a Black neighborhood annexed by the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood and incrementally razed through development in the second half of the twentieth century. There, Jones’s family tended a thriving garden whose bulbs were later transplanted to Jones’s home in the Twin Cities. Now, this return reseeds the healing greens back into a landscape marred by uprooted Black communities, from Mill Creek Valley and Pruitt-Igoe to ongoing gentrification and abandonment. Placing the collards along the bus system offers an alternate record of survivance and nourishment, a persistence of Black life and tradition stretching back centuries, and a proposition to the future health of the many communities the work will move through.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Seitu Ken Jones is a multidisciplinary artist, advocate and maker based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Working between the arts and public spheres, Jones channels the spirit of radical social movements into experiences that foster critical conversations and nurture more just and vibrant communities from the soil up. He is recognized as a dynamic collaborator and a creative force for civic engagement. Jones is a recently retired faculty member of Goddard College in Washington State. He holds a BS degree in Landscape Design and a MLS in Environmental History from the University of Minnesota. He’s been a Senior Fellow in Agricultural Systems in the College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Science Resources at the University of Minnesota and is a member of the board of managers for the Capitol Region Watershed District.