Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba Aiken: Shadows at the Crossroads
Thursday, June 20, 5 pm
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Free
Public Unveiling: 5 pm
Artist Remarks and Poetry Reading by
Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton: 6 pm
Artwork Tours: 6:30, 7 & 7:30 pm
Join us in celebrating the opening of the newest addition to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden: Shadows at the Crossroads, a new commission by Twin Cities–based artists Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba T. Aiken. A continuation of a project created for Nicollet Mall in 1992, Shadows at the Crossroads consists of seven sculptures celebrating important figures in Minnesota history. Together, the artists traced the shadows of community members and then worked with the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council to select the silhouettes that will appear in the Garden.
For the past three decades, Seitu Jones and Ta-coumba T. Aiken have each built bodies of work that encompass painting, sculpture, public works, and environmental design. Their overlapping interests in public art and community engagement have led to a number of projects that the artists have made as a duo.
Both artists actively focus on the potential of art to change society. Their past collaborations include their 2005 mural project Celebration of Life, located at Olson Memorial Highway and Lyndale Avenue in North Minneapolis. The artists are currently creating a set of large-scale artworks for a new housing development for the Rondo community Land Trust in the historic Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. Many of their works made together are participatory, involving community members as collaborators in the conception and realization of the projects.
One of the most visible of their collaborations is Shadows of Spirit (1992), a series of sculptures that Jones and Aiken were commissioned by the City of Minneapolis to create for Nicollet Mall, a busy downtown pedestrian walkway. The project honors significant figures from the region’s cultural history in the form of human silhouettes, which were cast in bronze and embedded in the street’s wide sidewalks. Poetry by Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton is inscribed on each shadow. The seven shadows in downtown Minneapolis represent stories of “Minnesota’s heroes,” some known, others unsung.
For the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Aiken and Jones have developed an extension of the Nicollet Mall project, entitled Shadows at the Crossroads. For the new work, the artists have once again have identified a group of individuals to be honored and celebrated in their public artwork.
In making the 2019 piece, the artists collaborated with the Walker Art Center’s Teen Arts Council (WACTAC), a nationally recognized program that Jones helped to launch in the early 1990s, when he was part of the museum’s department of Education and Community Programs. To “capture” the shape of each piece, the artists worked with WACTAC members to trace the shadows of more than 40 community members and then choose the seven silhouettes for the new project in the Garden. The artists then selected the individuals the shadows would commemorate, which range from specific historical figures to more general impressions. Poet Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton composed the lines of verse that appear within each of the sculptures, creating a lyrical reference to the life each work honors.
The seven figures honored in Jones and Aiken’s project include:
- Maḣpiya Wicaṡṭa (Cloud Man) (Bdewakantunwan Dakota, c. 1780–1862/1863) is central to Minnesota history, leading a Dakota agricultural community, Ḣeyate Otuŋwe (Village to the Side), on the shores of Bde Maka Ska throughout the 1830s.
- Harriet Robinson Scott: (1815–1876) was an African American slave who, with her husband, Dred Scott, unsuccessfully sued for their freedom.
- Untitled (Child): The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden was once a site from which the city’s parades would begin. Children who continue to appreciate the Garden are honored here.
- Time: This shadow celebrates the members of the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council who collaborated with the artists on the project.
- Eliza Winston (1830–death date unknown) was an American slave from Mississippi, who, when traveling with her owners to St. Anthony, Minnesota (a free territory) was able to successfully sue for her freedom.
- Kirk Washington, Jr. (1975–2016), an influential artist, poet, and activist with deep roots in the North Minneapolis community, organized a community space providing health care and other services to local adults and youths and worked to provide equal access to digital technologies. Washington was killed in a car crash in 2016.
- Siah Armajani (b. 1939), an artist who emigrated to Minnesota from Iran in 1960, has since been an important teacher to subsequent generations of artists and a voice for public art. Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988) connects the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden to Loring Park.
In the Garden, four of the sculptures will be cast in bronze and set into the concrete pathways; two will be etched into the sidewalks; and the final shadow will exist as a work only visible when wet from the elements. Soon to be installed in locations throughout the space, the works—like their counterparts on Nicollet Mall—are intended to be discovered by pedestrians as they make their way through the park’s pathways.
Working on his own or in collaboration with others, Seitu Jones (US, b. 1951) has created more than 35 large-scale public artworks. He has been awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship (1990), a Bush Artist Fellowship (1992), a Bush Leadership Fellowship (2005–2006), a National Endowment for the Arts/Theater Communication Group Designer Fellowship, a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2001–2002), and a Joyce Award (2015) from the Joyce Foundation. Jones has held residencies at the Harvard Ceramics Program, 651 Arts in Brooklyn, and was the first artist-in-residence for the City of Minneapolis. In 2012, Jones was a senior fellow in Agricultural Systems at the University of Minnesota, where he also received an MLS in Environmental History and a BS in Landscape Design. He retired from the faculty of Goddard College in Port Townsend, WA, and has exhibited his work at the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the American Craft Museum in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In 2017, Jones was the recipient of the McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, given to an individual Minnesota artist who has made a significant contribution to the state’s cultural life. His curated meal for the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI (2017), won the Grand Juried Prize for ArtPrize.
Jones has had a long history of engagement with the Walker, including a stint as a member of the Walker staff from 1990–1995. In addition to his involvement with a wide range of Walker programs, the artist recently created a limited-edition work—one of his seed bomb projects—for the Walker’s 2017 Avant Garden benefit event, a work also now in the collection.
Ta-coumba T. Aiken (US, b. 1952), is an artist, arts administrator, educator, and community activist who maintains an active studio and public art practice. He has participated in the creation of more than 300 murals and public sculptures, with themes ranging from local history to the artist’s own style of rhythmic pattern and spirit writing. Some of Aiken’s best known public artworks include the Seventh and Robert Street Municipal parking ramp (2008), the Minneapolis Central Library’s fourth floor fireplace (2006), the Jax/Gillette Children’s Hospital mural (2004), and the Good Thunder Grain Elevator North Side’s Pilot City murals project (1988). Aiken has presented his work at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2013), McNally Smith College of Music (2011), Amherst H. Wilder Foundation (2009), Minneapolis Institute of Art MAEP (2007), and the Walker Art Center (2007). The recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (1985) and a Bush Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship (1992), Aiken has work in a number of public and private collections, including those of Maya Angelou, the Walker, and General Mills.
The Walker has a long and continuous relationship with Aiken, acquiring his works for the collection, presenting his work here in several group exhibitions, commissioning his writing for the Walker’s website, and hosting the artist for a site-specific installation and various public programs.
ABOUT ROSEMARY SOYINI VINELLE GUYTON
Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton (US, b. 1947), is a St. Paul–based writer, poet, environmentalist, and flower gardener. Guyton’s texts/poems are featured in the St. Paul Cultural Garden, the Dale Street Green Line Station stop in St. Paul, and on Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. Interested in ways that African American women have navigated and contributed to Minnesota’s cultural and historic landscape, Guyton is a cofounder of the Minnesota Black Women’s History Project. Her works have explored and drawn inspiration from the forgotten lives of African American women, such as Eliza Winston and Harriet Robinson Scott, who lived in Minnesota in the 1800s and through their personal resistance have impacted and changed Minnesota state and federal laws. Currently, Guyton is working on a chapbook that explores the lives of these two extraordinary women: one free but enslaved; the other enslaved and living with the threat of her family being sold and separated; both petitioning the courts of law to gain their freedom.
The recipient of a Loft Mentor Award, Guyton has had her work published in the Butterfly Tree Anthology and has held artist residencies at Hedgebrook Writers Residency and Pine Needles Residency. Her writing on contemporary cultural issues has appeared in a variety of publications. A community activist, Guyton is also a cofounder of Frogtown Farm, an urban farm in St. Paul, Minnesota.
ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER
The Walker Art Center is a catalyst for the creative expression of artists and the active engagement of audiences. Focusing on the visual, performing, and media arts of our time, the Walker takes a global, multidisciplinary, and diverse approach to the creation, presentation, interpretation, collection, and preservation of art. Walker programs examine the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities.
One of the most internationally celebrated art museums, the multidisciplinary Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is known for presenting today’s most compelling artists from the United States and around the world. In addition to presentations of works from its world-renowned collection, the Walker organizes and hosts exhibitions that travel worldwide and annually presents a broad array of contemporary performance, music, dance, theater, design, moving image, and education programs. The adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, one of the country’s first urban sculpture parks, features at its center a beloved Twin Cities landmark—Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen—as well as some 40 sculptures by multigenerational artists from Minnesota and around the globe on the 19-acre Walker campus. Visit walkerart.org for more information on the Walker’s upcoming events and programs.