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 includes collaborative projects and interactions with the public, community groups, and other scholars and interdisciplinary arts-researchers. Many of Sean’s solo exhibitions and projects 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.
Sean received an MFA from Yale University in painting in 2005. His sculptural paintings are currently featured at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas as part of the Charlotte Street Fellows Exhibition. He was named a 2023 Charlotte Street Fellow, an award given annually to three Kansas City based artists by the Charlotte Street Foundation. In 2022 he received a commission to create a new piece for Kansas City International Airport. He has had solo shows at the 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). Sean received a 2017 Rocket Grant Award for Garden Variety Soda Fountain. He 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.