MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Walker Art Center is 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:

1. Maḣpiya Wic̣aṡṭa (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.

2. Harriet Robinson Scott: (1815–1876) was an African American slave who, with her husband, Dred Scott, unsuccessfully sued for their freedom.

3. 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.

4. Time: This shadow celebrates the members of the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council who collaborated with the artists on the project.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.