Name: Jordan Seaberry
Age: 35
Hometown: South Side of Chicago
Position: Assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, co-director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture
Jordan Seaberry’s parents encouraged him and his siblings to dream big.
Ambitious thinking led Seaberry on an unconventional path from cultivating comic book painting at the Rhode Island School of Design to organizing protests as an activist and advocating for families stricken by murder at the Nonviolence Institute.
Today, Seaberry, 35, is an assistant professor at RISD, teaching drawing, and the co-director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.
But his journey has been far from a straight line. Seaberry became disillusioned after moving from the South Side of Chicago to Providence to attend art school.
He began contemplating “how art could possibly matter in a world of war, hunger and poverty.”
He set up a stand to serve people meals at Kennedy Plaza as he ruminated on issues of gender, race and class and how they shape society.
“I fell in love with activist work,” Seaberry said. “Politics became more and more important.”
He dropped out of school and volunteered for Direct Action For Rights And Equality: DARE. He worked as a legislative advocate to pass criminal justice reforms as the director of public policy at the Nonviolence Institute.
RISD let Seaberry, a painter, resume his studies. He began mulling the intersection between art and politics and nourishing both simultaneously.
“I came to politics because I’m an artist. An artist is someone who blurs the lines between these distinctions,” said Seaberry, who keeps a studio in the city’s West End.
Along the way, he also earned a master of studies in law degree at the Roger Williams University School of Law as a fellow, building on his knowledge of the legal system. He served as chair of the Providence Board of Canvassers, overseeing the city’s elections.
“If there’s a lane for me, it’s those lanes between lanes,” he said.
Seaberry’s plans for the year ahead included creating a publication, possibly an interactive, for his most recent exhibition with hospice care patients − “We Live Until” − as a recipient of an Interlace Grant.
He also intends to launch some big public work with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.
