At 75, Seitu K. Jones gets his first solo museum show — revealing decades of rarely seen art

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