Jordan Seaberry

Lives and works in Providence, RI

Artist statement

My practice combines painting and policy change, in equal measure. Considering painting as an act of listening and politics as an act of relating, I see the external results as two extensions of the same investigation. My paintings bridge a practice of collage, mixed media painting, sampling and drawing. My politics involve a years-long performance of the government (the US Department of Arts and Culture) legislative organizing, and political leadership. Both of these threads come alive with one animating fact: if matter cannot be created or destroyed, then the embers that swallowed my grandfather’s Mississippi home are still here with us, in us. Every bead of sweat he dropped running through the woods soaked into the dirt, as his family’s abandoned garden decomposed into soil. The smoke’s carbon monoxide fed the pines that may have been milled into my stretcher bars. But if every particle of the fire is still here, then so is every drop of water that extinguished it. As in, every drop of water needed for the fires of the future is already here, moving through me, through you, through a cloud and a sunflower. All the tools we need for the fights of the future are already here and, indeed, always have been. My job as an artist and an organizer is to take those tools, to name them, depict them, to hand them out. Each painting is in search of this: how to listen in paint, relate within a politic, and gather water for tomorrow.

Artwork