Image: Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul
The exhibition ‘The Smell of Earth: Seitu K. Jones Working in the Elements’ runs from October 22, 2026, through July 25, 2027, in the Nancy and John Lindahl Gallery and Sally and Ernest Lehmann Family Gallery. It is the first major solo museum exhibition of Jones’s work.
The exhibition celebrates the four-decade career of St. Paul multidisciplinary artist Seitu K. Jones, bringing together drawings, paintings, sculptures, design and archival material. The Smell of Earth focuses on Jones’s less-examined studio work, presenting it alongside objects and ephemera from his extensive archive documenting his experience as a Black artist in Minnesota.
Jones describes his practice as ‘tending the soil of community.’ He is known for more than 40 large-scale public art projects that shape the Twin Cities landscape, as well as Community Meal events designed to encourage dialogue among neighbors and bridge understanding.
Through drawings, paintings, sculptures and design, Jones honors African American culture, symbolism, history and ancestral knowledge; consistent with his preference for collaboration within the community, he worked closely with curators Ego Ahaiwe Sowinksi and Alexandra Nicome to select work for the exhibition. The studio work explores the relationship between Midwestern landscapes and Jones’s body, family history and distant ancestors through charcoal, pigment and clay.
The exhibition gathers work from across Jones’s practice, with a focus on the land and its creative bounty, the subject and material that most consistently captures his attention.
