JORDAN SEABERRY:
But Mostly We Waited for Spring, When There Could Be Gardens
September 9 - October 29, 2022
Public reception: September 9, 5:30 – 8 pm
That Freed Self, 2022, watercolor, 60x60 inches
Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present But Mostly We Waited for Spring, When There Could Be Gardens, an exhibition of new paintings by Jordan Seaberry. The exhibition will run from September 9 – October 29, 2022, with a public opening reception on Friday, September 9 from 5:30 – 8 pm.
The paintings on view represent a departure for Seaberry, both in terms of their subject and materiality. Using Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographs as source material and watercolor as his primary medium, Seaberry has created an complex body of work that simultaneously draws from history and collapses it.
“For two brief moments in the twentieth century, the federal government demonstrated that it can, when it chooses, directly support artists not as mere commercial engines or tourism supporters, but as cultural practitioners. The WPA of the New Deal Era and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) of the 70’s, showed what we all should know: artists are smart people, able to solve big problems, and build social cohesion through cultural practice.
Artists constantly build politics of cooperation in the face of extractive industries, insisting on the importance of cultural tapestries for building new relationships to each other and to the natural world. Each painting in this group is compositionally built on one of the photos created by a WPA photographer, some of the most remarkable photos of our history. The resulting paintings exist in conversation with and compression of that history.
The figures represent a departure from much of my previous work which often involved anonymized, fictional or historical figures. Here, each painting depicts and recontextualizes a person who has built, supported, loved me: an act of labor also often ignored.
Watercolor is deployed here laboriously and gently, on small traditional scales, and unusually large canvases. The surfaces are built through several perfected layers of modeling paste and gesso, power sanded to operate like paper. Harkening to architectural and construction materials, its absorbent surface holds the delicate paint within the history of its labor.
At odds here are not just the materials: watercolor at a large scale, canvas labored into smoothness, but time as well. History is compressed through layer and linearity. The politics are not interpersonal: no figures make eye contact with anyone but the viewer, instead these works investigate a relationship beyond extraction, an anti-progression, a remembrance of the trees and water that predate and outlast the telephone pole and the factory. The rightful inheritance of these figures isn't wealth or land, it’s relationship.”
Jordan Seaberry is a painter, organizer, legislative advocate and educator. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Jordan first came to Providence to attend Rhode Island School of Design. Alongside his studio practice, he built a career as a grassroots organizer, helping to fight and pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones, including Probation Reform, the Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners Bill, and laying the groundwork for the “Ban the Box” movement in Rhode Island.
Seaberry serves as Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, a people-powered nonprofit agency, and most recently worked as the Director of Public Policy at the Nonviolence Institute. He serves as Chairman of the Providence Board of Canvassers, overseeing the city’s elections; as a Board Member at New Urban Arts in Providence; and as a Board Member for Protect Families First, working on community-oriented drug policy reform. He has received fellowships from the Art Matters Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, and recently served as Community Leader Fellow at Roger Williams University School of Law.
Seaberry has exhibited work with several institution, including the RISD Museum, the deCordova Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum, and the Boston Center for the Arts. His work has been featured in exhibitions throughout New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and elsewhere. This is Seaberry’s second solo exhibition with Steven Zevitas Gallery.
