BOX-O-BLUES, 2024 

Oil paint on wooden boxes

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BODOM BEAD, Unknown Date, Ghana

Fired glass, in contemporary oak box (2000)

In some of the earliest European accounts of travel in Africa, traders reported that beads were used as a form of currency and, although not likely the case with this particular bead, they were sometimes offered in exchange for slaves. Made with powdered and pigmented glass that has been pressed into a vertical mould, these objects were prized for their bold colors. Jones purchased this glass bead in London and later, he built the box that preserves its complicated material history.

The body in exchange for a bead – a human body rendered equivalent in value to a glass bead – raises more questions than can be addressed in a short label. But here is a short provocation: Blackness is arguably the primary product of this exchange, more than any labor extracted from enslaved people’s hands. The bead represents a crisis of value that haunts the reality of black being to this day. How might we honor the lives entangled in this ongoing exchange?

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SLAVE SHIP KITE, 1991

Oil paint, paper, spruce, cotton string

In the 1990s, Jones made a series of painted kites that featured portraits, symbols, and scenes, like the large boat-shaped work displayed here. A blue sky dotted with clouds provides the background for a group of black figures. The shape and positioning of their bodies recalls the “Description of a Slave Ship,” an 18th-century image of a ship’s hold that abolitionists used to argue against the practice of chattel slavery. In the diagram, enslaved people are tightly packed into the dark compartments below a vessel’s deck. 

Rather than sitting inside a ship, floating in the Atlantic, Jones’s figures are flying. The kite offers several critical reversals: blue water becomes blue sky; sea foam evaporates and condenses into puffy clouds; and the confinement of the ship’s hold gives way to free skies.

TRADITIONAL BLACK DIASPORIC BOAT SERIES

35mm slides and digital images (1993) enlarged and printed on agave base eco-paper (2025)

Diverse methods of boat building can be found in Africa and across the diaspora. Jones has traveled in West Africa, South America, and the Caribbean documenting building techniques that have been inherited and adapted by black people. 

The combined topics of blackness and boat culture might first bring to mind the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, but Jones draws our attention to those vessels over which black people have agency. In offering images of black people crafting and sailing their own boats, Jones shifts the conversation from an overwhelming history of dispossession to important moments of self-possession.

Preserved in 35 mm slide format, this selection of reprinted photographs has served many purposes over the years. They record Jones’s travels, act as primary sources in his research, and stand on their own as careful compositions that demand close looking.

YEMANJA AND HER WADING BIRDS  (study for mural), 1993

Oil on board

In this twilight scene, a veiled woman dressed in white holds a mirror in one hand and uses her other to command the attention of many species of waterfowl. Each of these elements—the mirror, white garments, and references to water—indicate that our central character is Yemanja, the mother of all orishas, or gods, in the Yoruba religion. In the 1990s, Jones spent time in Brazil where he encountered elements of West African religions that enslaved people brought across the Atlantic and incorporated into their spiritual lives in the Americas. Significant for this exhibition, Yemanja presides over the water and the moon and offers protection to women and children. 

This work was a preparatory drawing for a mural Jones painted on the interior walls of the History Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Visitors can still find the mural in the theater’s lower level. 

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SOYINI SWIMMING, 1997—1998

Oil on masonite

“…Though black had been described to me as the absence of light, it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the color, black…”

— James Baldwin in Introduction to Exhibition of Beauford Delaney, 1964

Ripples, bubbles, and minor currents surround Soyini Guyton, the subject of this portrait. Jones’s brushwork and subtle variations of blue show the texture of water against water and black skin under the surface. Here, the interaction between liquid and skin deepens our understanding of reflected light. 

In the quote above, James Baldwin describes the quality of light in the work of Beauford Delany, an African American abstractionist known for his facility with bright and radiant colors. In this spirit, Jones’s painting reveals the glisten, shimmer, and joyful shine that emanates from black in blue.

SHE CAN C FREEDOM (Tribute to Hughie Lee Smith) 1985, retouched 2025

Oil on masonite

Made with a combination of traditional oils and paints typically used in theater set design, this work depicts a black woman with long braids as she stands on a shoreline. Her figure does not face the viewer; we stand behind her, and with her, as she looks into a distant horizon.

This is a powerful position for you, the viewer. Consider where you stand: you see with her, you share her perspective, you follow her, and you have the potential to carry forward her vision.

She Can C Freedom shows the boundless and many-hued blues of sea and sky, taking us to the very limits of our collective vision. 

Seitu Ken Jones is a multidisciplinary artist, builder, and organizer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He works in many materials and methods, from ceramics to social sculpture, and his artworks can be found in countless public spaces across the Twin Cities. Channeling Blacks & Blues gathers an intimate body of work that represents just a part of Jones’s rich studio practice.

For decades, Jones has researched and riffed on Black folk traditions that developed along banks of the Mississippi River, shorelines in the Americas, and ports in West Africa. In this work, black and blue are literal, conceptual, and historical guides that trace his enduring interest in pigments, boat cultures and, with singular focus, the story of Black people on water.

(Additional biographical details can be found here)

Since the 1970s, Seitu K. Jones has traveled through West Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States learning and documenting boat building practices. For Jones, boats are powerful vessels for aesthetic experimentation, environmental activism, and public engagement.

Drawing on folk traditions closely tied with Blues music, Jones uses the practice of call and response to create works of art that are sources of community pride. Whether muddy, stormy, or troubled waters, Jones deftly navigates rising tides and eroding shorelines, modeling respect and love for our natural resources.

Channeling Blacks & Blues features sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings and archival objects that trace Jones’s decades-long study of Black boat culture, with a focus on the aesthetics of Blues that shape his practice.

Guest Curators: Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski and Alexandra Nicome