Photo: Jim Barcus for KC Studio Magazine
Sean Nash (b. Memphis, TN, 1980) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose embodied research with food, fermentation, and farming informs his artistic practice. Sean’s vibrant paintings and sculptures involve sensory curiosity, pleasure, and evolving dynamics with the more-than-human world. Playing with diverse types of material constituents, including kombucha papers, vegetal matter, and natural dyes in tandem with contemporary sculptural materials and acrylics, his work elicits questions regarding multiple temporalities and perceptions of stability. The queer and trans ecological themes present in his work draw on his lived experience and his fascination with the microbial world.
His expansive practice often includes collaborative projects and interactions with the public, community groups, other scholars, and interdisciplinary arts-researchers. Many of Sean’s solo exhibitions and projects from 2014 onward have included food fermentation as participatory and gustatory elements of sculptures and exhibition programming. His individual and collaborative writing has been published in Fermenting Feminism, Cuizine, and Musings: Food, Feminism, Fermentation. His work has appeared in the magazines MOLD and Fermentation.
His body of work portraying dynamic and interconnected ecosystems merging land and sea was shown at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS in 2023. In 2022 he received a commission to create a new piece for Kansas City International Airport. He has had solo shows at the Volland Foundation in Alma, KS (Currents of Ancients, 2024), Crossroads Hotel in Kansas City (Land Taste, 2022), Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis University (Krautsourcing, 2019), Plug Projects in Kansas City, (Lactobacillus Amongus, 2017), and Black Ball Projects in Brooklyn, NY (They/Them/Their, 2016). His awards include a 2023 Charlotte Street Fellows Award, a 2017 Rocket Grant Award for Garden Variety Soda Fountain, along with other prestigious awards and residencies. He received an MFA from Yale University in painting and printmaking in 2005. He lives and works in Kansas City, Kansas.
Nash’s latest body of sculptural paintings are shaped like marine life forms and include casts of vegetables and single-use “clamshell” packaging. Listen to him speak about the work in a 15 min video below.