Collard Greens

For Counterpublic 2023, Seitu Ken Jones seeded an iteration of his ongoing collard greens series across the Metro bus system, weaving family recipes and dispersed designs along the Jefferson Avenue corridor. Inspired by the ways in which food is a primary means of communal gathering and of passing along knowledge and ancestral meaning in Black culture, the project acted as a distribution system, circulating the greens through the city and transmitting recipes to new households.

The project had roots in the artist’s aunt’s garden in Meacham Park, a Black neighborhood annexed by the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood and incrementally razed through development in the second half of the twentieth century. There, Jones’s family tended a thriving garden whose bulbs were later transplanted to Jones’s home in the Twin Cities. This return reseeded the healing greens back into a landscape marred by uprooted Black communities, from Mill Creek Valley and Pruitt-Igoe to ongoing gentrification and abandonment. Placing the collards along the bus system offers an alternate record of survivance and nourishment, a persistence of Black life and tradition stretching back centuries, and a proposition to the future health of the many communities the work will move through.