Jordan Weber is a Des Moines–based multi-disciplinary artist/activist who works predominantly with inner-city communities nationwide, with a focus on the Midwest. A 2018 Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art, he has exhibited nationally, including at White Cube (New York), Macalester College’s Law Warschaw Gallery (St. Paul), the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn), the Des Moines Art Center, the Soap Factory (Minneapolis), and The Museum of Broken Windows, an NCLU-organized pop-up exhibition in Greenwich Village in September 2018. His work asks: “How do we live independently from a system that is unsustainable for our societal whole and live towards communal empowerment? If a legacy of violence against the land threatens violence against the bodies that should be nourished and supported by it, how can we best respond? When heritage speaks to survival despite ongoing structural disadvantage what art objects can we build now, that our descendants will thrive from?”
1.
THE YEAR IN HIP HOP
Best hip hop album is a split between about five albums (for me) this year! There have been so many heads producing non-stop, especially with producer Daringer turning everything he touches into diamonds. But I’ll give two of my favorites: Black Thought and 9th Wonder’s Streams Of Thought Vol. 1 and—man, this is a tough one—B.E.N.N.Y.’s Tana Talk 3. But if your feelin’ a little aggressive with it, I’d go with Westside Gunn’s Supreme Blientele or Fetti, by Curren$y and Freddie Gibbs. for the year. I just can’t pick one.
2.
THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE
I have to have an environmental reading on the top-ten list! So, I have to recommend my go environmental book that changed the course of my art practice! The Ecology of Commerce (1993) by Paul Hawken. Without sounding preachy, I’ve been on my friends, family, and colleagues for about 11 years straight about the situations we are dealing with globally because humans simply won’t sacrifice their comfort levels for the greater good. It’s without a doubt the most monumental issue facing all living beings on this planet.
3.
EVEREST CAFE
Best food joint of 2018 is Everest Cafe (Nepalese) in St. Louis—by far! Can’t speak enough about this spot.
4.
WE THE ANIMALS
Top movie of the year is We the Animals. My brother and I used to run around our apartment complex getting into non-stop trouble. My older brother would make little sculptures out of paper, and we’d sell them door to door to get enough money to buy candy at the gas station next door. I followed him everywhere and marveled in his madness as he’d set things on fire at the complex, like the rubber truck tire sand pit on the playground so we could watch the firetrucks come.
5.
A MONUMENTAL JOURNEY
Best art experience of the year was finally seeing the Kerry James Marshall 24-foot-tall African drum sculpture, A Monumental Journey, go up in my home city of Des Moines. I’ve come to learn thgat it is his last public sculpture commission of his career, and I am honored to have served on the board to see it finally come to fruition.
6.
AMELIE
Best Moment of 2018 is a little sappy but: Amelie, my daughter and only child, turned one! She is everything to us!
7.
4MX GREENHOUSE
The best personal art practice moment of my career was completed this year as well! Built on the foundation of Malcolm X’s birth site on a 70-acre plot in North Omaha, the 4MX Greenhouse is a sculptural and programmatic greenhouse built from an ideation of individual and community holistic health.
8.
SEITU JONES
The most effective social practitioner of 2018 is the Twin Cities’s own Seitu Jones. He is a wealth of knowledge and has the most thorough execution of community-based projects of anyone I’ve had the pleasure calling a friend and future collaborator.
9.
SOUL OF A NATION
The best art exhibition I saw in person was the Brooklyn Museum’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which “shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment.”
10.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
I’m choosing to end on an infuriating note: the continuation of Black and Brown men and women being killed by police in 2018 from coast to coast. I list their names here (those who made the news) as a reminder of their lives and of the families that have been forever altered by the racially fueled trigger fingers of occupying forces in our communities.
Laudemer Abordela, 33
DeAndre Ballard, 23
Armond Beckwith-Bell, 28
Demontry Floytra Boyd, 43
Emantic “EJ” Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr., 21
Patrick Bryant, 41
Christopher Carroll, 30
Albert Ramon Dorsey, 30
Theoddeus Gray, 29
Botham Shem Jean, 26
Travis Jordan, 36
Timothy Leon, 24
Jarmane Logan, 35
Tony Mathis, 47
Olajuwon Murphy, 22
Jesse Quinton, 35
Jarvis Randall, 30
Antwon Rose Jr., 17
Jemel Roberson, 26
Charles Roundtree, 18
Derrick Alexander Sellman, 28
Jacob Servais, 19
Tony Bernard Smith, 24
Rio Antwuan Thomas, 27
Martez Webb, 23
Robert Lawrence White, 41
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.