The Midwest Art Quarterly
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No. 1
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No. 4
November 13, 2024
Cleveland, OH
Abattoir Gallery
Shawn Powell: Triangle, Circle, Square
October 19, 2024–December 15, 2024
Sometimes I find myself thinking about art as a drug. My highs always start with those formal elements that most readily present themselves; that's what has me hooked for life. Frank Stella once said that his art was “based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.” Powell’s paintings can be pictures of specific things — pencils, cigarettes, hoses, fridges — but they are effective as essentially formal arrangements. They are what they are, and what is there is there: canvases of certain shapes and dimensions with colors painted on their surfaces. Their stripes and congruent shapes are finite in their properties; each painting is self-sufficient but follows a seemingly pre-determined formal logic bound by the edges of Powell's supports.
—Alex Vlasov
November 7, 2024
Cleveland, OH
SHED Projects
Alex Adkinson and Tristan Higginbotham: Fouling the Nest
October 12, 2024–November 9, 2024
We all love alternative spaces that offer something other than white walls. However, such venues present evaluative problems: artworks in these settings have to compete with the latent intrigue of their environments. There is no question that Adkinson and Higginbotham both demonstrate a high level of craft and skill, yet this has to stand up against the debris of history which their exhibition’s setting has inherited. Their work, in fact, is a good match for the space, though maybe too good — the art tends to dissolve into the walls and become almost invisible. The artists' subdued colors are confined by the tones of the surrounding walls; their works continually permute. What kicks for me about this show is that it seems Adkinson and Higginbotham have found unique approaches to combining construction with deconstruction. Their exhibition, therefore, proposes new possibilities for balancing these two poles in future art.
—Alex Vlasov
October 31, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Scott Burton: Shape Shift
September 6, 2024–February 2, 2025
From the seventies on, Burton made a career exploiting the "idea" that furniture can be art. Inherently pedantic, as everything in the modern world is aesthetic to some degree. What’s crucial is what kind of experience something offers; Burton’s experiences are kitsch. To be sure, there are smart formal experiments — one object is a single sheet of steel, cut and folded to form a chair; the marble slabs are impeccably hewn. I'd happily live with this furniture, but as artworks they have an obtuse, academic aspect that great art transcends. Cleverness might mildly entertain, but it is not cleverness that moves the soul.
—Bret Schneider
October 16, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Laumeier Sculpture Park
Monika Weiss: Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture)
August 24, 2024–December 15, 2024
Weiss’s composition is austere and ethereal, which fails to manifest the dirge (an ancient Greek form) it’s meant to. But in critically failing, Weiss touches on the complicated problem of art’s self-distancing from ritual in the modern world — terrible because we’ve lost the functional magic of art, progressive because we’re forced to imagine new modes of representation adequate to our modern reality’s alienated feelings. The power of Weiss’s composition is mysterious and its meaning vague, as though it is yet to be determined. Certainly, women aren't out there in the woods wailing and tearing at their skin. What, then, is a dirge for us?
—Bret Schneider
October 11, 2024
St. Louis, MO
William Shearburn Gallery
Tom Friedman: 6S, 5P, 1P, 1C and 1V
September 20, 2024–October 25, 2024
Friedman gives you objects that start out by making you mad for how stupidly disordered they seem, until there’s a magnetic flip and they become suddenly compelling (i.e., intentional-seeming). This same effect drives good works like the photographs (which are slightly edited to accentuate dumb little compositional qualities) and bad ones like a sculpture of spaghetti tossed at the wall (surprise, it’s painted steel). One work, Untitled (8½ x 11), deserves special mention. By turning the daunting blankness of a blank page into itself an arena for imaginative play, the piece focalizes this empty-gesture/significant-form dialectic.
—Troy Sherman
October 5, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
George Caleb Binham. Raftsmen Playing Cards. Oil on canvas. 1847.
In his river scenes, Bingham's foreground figures assert themselves against backdrops that are swallowingly indistinct, almost spectral. This painting is all form up front; the barge pushes back into formless nature, as if it's bringing order. But it's not order, exactly — look at the firewood, the strewn tools, the disheveled clothes. Rather, it's distinctness. Each of Bingham's objects (people included) is total and self-contained. The things he's painted may assort themselves in complicated ways, the space between them may swell with significance, but everything is firm, well-defined.
—Troy Sherman
October 3, 2024
Sauget, IL
NON STNDRD
Jeff Robinson: Try and Again
September 7, 2024–October 19
Robinson’s show contains patchwork relief sculptures that mostly work like paintings, as well as several notched-out shapely sticks. The former demonstrate Robinson’s sense for how a well-placed color can exacerbate tensions between the conflicting material qualities of various juxtaposed surfaces. The latter were carved with a respectable sense of rhythm. In general, however, there’s a cleanness to Robinson’s execution that undercuts the frankness of his configurations. Some bird shit had found its way onto one of his stick sculptures, making it work much better artistically. Trust me when I say that that’s not an insult — just an observation about how this artist might benefit from admitting more crassness and contingency into his method.
—Troy Sherman
October 1, 2024
Sauget, IL
NON STNDRD
Aimée Beaubien: Hold Tight
September 7, 2024–October 19, 2024
Beaubien’s exhibition is what you would get if you thought the problem with Duchamp’s famous twine installation was that it didn’t have enough “form,” which was not the problem with Duchamp’s famous twine installation. It’s certainly lazy to bring up those “sixteen miles of string” in relation to this piece, but it’s lazier to fill a room with rope and call it art. It seems that the purpose of Beaubien’s colors, plus all the chunks of wood and the photograph hanging from her cords, is to provide the appearance of compositional intent to an arrangement that is overwhelmingly chaotic and disordered. Chaos and disorder, however, can be aesthetically productive.
—Troy Sherman
September 26, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Kehinde Wiley. Charles I. Oil on canvas. 2018.
It would be tough to find many museumgoers who think that what the Dutch were up to around 1600 is all that relevant to America in 2024. What, then, is Wiley’s florid, repurposing kiss-off doing here? Turn from his portrait to the original Charles I it’s juxtaposed with (done by Daniel Mytens I in 1633). Any 21st-century person will immediately find the older work’s opulent, curlicued gold frame pompous, maybe even ridiculous. The king himself is merely another king; he means nothing to us. But turn further and discover gloomy still lives; poor musicians begging in doorways; dark, somber, Northern pictures of ice skaters and old mothers. The 21st century simply does not belong in this room. It’s a desperate failure of aesthetic thought to attempt to pierce the fullness of our contemplation of a different era.
—Sam Jennings
September 24, 2024
Detroit, MI
Saint Louis Art Museum
Ellsworth Kelly
3600 Heidelberg Street
Tyree Guton. The Heidelberg Project. 1986-Ongoing.
Energy and quality are often in tension. The Heidelberg Project undercuts itself by failing to account for this dynamic. Items people toss to the curb are distributed around vacant lots on Heidelberg Street in Detroit. I don’t know what is meant to be thought-provoking or aesthetically pleasing about random trash on empty lots, but it is true that strewn objects can possess energy. However, the precise orchestration of all this trash undercuts its implied energetic randomness. It feels like a garage sale on the block, so people keep stopping by. I get that the project has a giant mission and statement, but I make my judgments while encountering art, not while reading about it.
—Alex Vlasov
September 16, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Bruno David Gallery and The Columbia Foundation for the Visual Arts
Leslie Laskey: Woodcuts
July 13, 2024–December 14, 2024
Laskey toed a line that few abstract woodblock printmakers can toe: the line that separates thorough engagement with such a haptic and surface-y medium from indulgence in the superficial sexinesses that attend pressing wood to paper. The dryness and the layering of his colors, the vagaries of grain, the heft of shapes which you necessarily get from gouging a block of wood — these are all aspects of the medium that smaller artists turn into so many fetishes. Laskey, however, made them assets. The surety of his compositions anchors the tenuousness with which they seem to hold to the paper they’re printed on.
—Troy Sherman
September 11, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
May 3, 2024–November 10, 2024
Smith’s recontextualized United States map paintings can be stimulating, typically more so the more genuinely abstract they are. The example on view here, however, is so on-the-nose as to feel almost inartistic. It’s paired with a woven canoe sculpture filled with conceptual objects that essentially turn it into a dull piece of prose. Thankfully, there are some interesting drawings along the gallery’s left wall. Through their vague gestures and solid shapes, the viewer gets to see a kind of proto-version of what happens when Smith unleashes her full intellect and instincts as an artist.
—Sam Jennings
September 7, 2024
St. Louis, MO
700 Market Street
Philip Johnson. 700 Market. 1974.
It’s easy to see that a Johnson building like AT&T or Detroit’s weird gothic skyscraper is “postmodern.” (Both, to be sure, are lovely, silly notions.) This sculpture in downtown St. Louis — more like his Glass House in its measured commitment both to structure and to playful conception — resists such neat classification. Yeah, the way it cleaves its rectangular footprint with that tall slab of brick is a shitpost about “formalism,” and its spliced offset central rotunda is certainly a joke on the severity of its two main masses. But Saarinen mixed brick and steel and glass not dissimilarly, and how these columns elevate a form so impossibly, imposingly big is reminiscent enough of Mies. On the one hand, you could say that this building is interstitial, style-wise; on the other, that Johnson’s perverse sense of weight and balance led to a structure whose guile, capaciousness, surety, and heft belie style altogether.
—Troy Sherman
September 5, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Romare Bearden: Resonances
May 3, 2024–September 15, 2024
This show’s clear centerpiece, Bearden’s Summertime from 1967, is absolutely worth any viewer’s time. Part collage, it has a great deal of life and color — I hear jazz coming out of it, really. Something about the piece feels peculiar and right. It draws the eye. You see a surface made of chips and pieces: an uglified mosaic, but ugly as in interesting. A very pretty ugliness coming out of New York — the genuine American city — with little leitmotifs of characters and silhouettes, noise, things crashing into each other. One wants neither more nor less color from it. Then, the surface deepens — you sense the space of the city alleys, stairs, and stoops. It’s a remarkable evocation.
—Sam Jennings
September 3, 2024
West Alton, MO
Audubon Center at Riverlands
Thomas Sleet. River Ark. Driftwood, charring, mirrored glass. 2022.
Utilizing found driftwood posts — charred black and minimally arranged in two ascending rows that jut straight into the sky — Sleet has allowed his viewers an acute awareness of scale, site, and gravity. When I visited, a bird was making its nest in the sculpture’s tallest post. While naturalists will swoon over an artwork that is part of nature in such a way, the artist’s mind will appreciate how, in fact, it is nature that becomes part of the artwork. Like a cigarette butt caught in the eternity of Pollock's paintings, nature is not here affirmed, but keenly articulated and given a chance to be seen in the redeeming light of aesthetic reflection. Sleet has given form to the terrible formlessness of nature. In turn, nature thanks him for it.
—Bret Schneider
August 26, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Frank Dillon. The Colossal Pair, Thebes. Oil on canvas. 1856.
It’s often very useful to seek out average or simplistic artworks from the past. It helps you better understand what was or wasn’t working about that era’s conception of the world. Compare Dillon’s trite mythoscape with John Martin’s Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, with which it shares a gallery at SLAM (and which I wrote about in the first issue of MAQ’s second volume). You get a sense of the difference between grand Romanticism of the purest kind (Sadak) and the mere prettiness of a picture (The Colossal Pair). Romanticism was about saying the unsayable, so you can negatively learn what constitutes great art by observing a painting like Dillon’s, which can only really say something sentimental about the awe of ancient lands. It’s entirely Victorian — like printing Shelley’s “Ozymandias” on a postcard.
—Sam Jennings
August 26, 2024
Omaha, NE
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers
May 18, 2024–September 15, 2024
Paul Stephen Benjamin: Black of Night
May 18, 2024–September 15, 2024
The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions presents some interpretive difficulties. On their own, the individual artworks are clearly presented. Halfmoon’s totemic figures evoke Olmec statuary (as the exhibition program helpfully points out) and are replete with the evidences of the artists’ practice. Benjamin’s symbolic and culturally resonant flags and video loops evoke the wide experience of black culture situated within the broader American social landscape. But when viewed at the same time, the two artists’ works begin to speak to each other in unusual — and maybe even in unwelcome — ways. A video installation of tremulous piano loops could be easily overheard in the Bemis’ front gallery where Halfmoon’s statues were arranged in an eerily vacuous pattern; my experience of these sculptures was undoubtedly nuanced by the sounds. This happened in a few other places as well. The quiet stillness of Halfmoon’s ceramics was continually bombarded by the loudness of Benjamin’s sound structures. Was this a deliberate choice by the curators? MAQ’s most recent editorial discussed how curatorial choices affect artistic interpretation; this show is a good example of that thesis. Are the artworks of Halfmoon and Benjamin given deeper meaning and significance when placed together, or is their particular power weakened, diluted?
—William Collen
August 21, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Abdallah Ibn al-Fadl. Doctors Preparing Burnt Copper (folio from an illustrated Arabic manuscript of Dioscorides’ De materia medica). Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper. 1224.
This page comes from an Arabic manuscript of De materia medica, a first-century Greco-Roman tract that set the foundation for Western medicine’s understanding of medicinal plants. (You can find more awesome pages from this same Arabic tome at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Asian Art.) What resonates with me about illuminations like this is their simultaneous familiarity and distance: the modernistically flat, cartoonish depictions of utterly foreign past realities. Look at the imbalanced lobster claw hands! The leftmost eye, just two strokes, no circle. The texture of their headcovers: layers of folds up top and the swishing tail down their backs. Much of this feels like the work of a 20th century artist: it’s an evocation of known images through non-naturalistic means. But who are these men and why are they burning copper? Why depict the scene so that it looks like one man’s legs are being flayed? This is the fun tension at the heart of our experience of any artwork that is so historically distant.
—Ben Zeno
August 14, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Currents 123: Tamara Johnson
April 5, 2024–September 22, 2024
It’s hard to write aesthetically-grounded criticism about art that is this cerebral. It feels like a thesis, a thinkpiece launch pad. But what of the aesthetic experience, the art part? Johnson’s installation is an assemblage, seemingly of found commercial detritus. Upon closer examination, everything’s revealed to be a durable sculpture: American cheese squares of rubber and acrylic, a cast-pewter and varnished “plastic” chair. The sheen of the cascading ropes of raffle tickets (actually screen prints on copper) imbues them with the value that a child sees in them. They play well with the concrete beams in the gallery’s ceiling, and the sweet memories they conjure loom over the rest of the exhibition. This is why there is promise in playing with mundane objects! But beyond that, there isn’t much to directly experience here—it’s all just for exegesis.
—Ben Zeno
August 8, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Rosalyn Drexler. Fresh News (Men and Machines). Acrylic and paper collage on canvas. 1965.
In the Contemporary wing at SLAM, mixed in among some confections, there’s this great little work from one of the most playful and charming Pop artists. Drexler’s colors and cutouts are what I always think of when I think “Pop,” even more so than Marilyn or the Campbell’s soup cans. Drexler has none of the calculated naivety of a Warhol or the self-satisfied winking of a Lichtenstein. Her work actually pops, actually makes an image resonate with pop cultural totems and delicious irony. Juxtaposition, in Fresh News, has become more than just an academic cliche. The painting is a great example of Drexler’s pure understanding of mid-century American iconicism and character. One feels the soul of the era humming in its droll spaces—it’s Pure Pop.
—Sam Jennings
August 6, 2024
Springfield, MO
Springfield Art Museum
Philip Reisman. The Meat Market. Oil on canvas. 1955.
Max Beckmann’s Weimar Germany rhymes with Polish immigrant Philip Reisman’s Lower East Side. The uniform ugliness of the latter’s painting of a meat market is certainly eye-catching. The hooks look ready to snatch the man on the right, whose white smock is marred with blood. Everyone’s faces are in shadow — no eye is visible except the one that pokes out of the darkness on the far left. Bloody bathrobe man carts around two disembodied legs, almost swallowed by meat; his own haul and the pale limb above muscle him out of the frame. The one (almost) relief is a Blue Period fruit peddler with a misshapen basket. What is he doing here? Offering an unsanitary snack? Embracing vegetarianism? Despite all this attention-grabbing, Reisman isn’t operating at quite the level of his German counterpart Beckman (or the British Francis Bacon, who also loved butcher shop carcasses). The brick wall forms an odd plane that doesn’t fully line up with the sidewalk like it should. The meat is copy-pasted too many times for one painting — better to do it across works, as did Bacon with his themes and variations. Everything pretty obviously exists in Reisman’s scene to get covered in blood: it’s one-note. There’s even a stray, likely accidental, blood drop at the end of the meat hook railroad in the top left. The air itself is stained.
—Ben Zeno
July 31, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Cunst Gallery
Alex Evets: Missouri—As It Truly Is
July 13 , 2024–Late August, 2024
Evets' Cunst joint — full of dumbly Missouri-shaped items — is very funny and artistically exceptional. Along with Britany Mosier’s Mark Twain Cave Rave at Monaco, it's one of the few shows I’ve seen in St. Louis that’s made me think, “This shit would only make sense here.” Marina May’s Naked Cake Walk piece from early last year probably fits the bill, too. Of course, this mostly has to do with how thematically Midwestern Evets', May's, and Mosier's stuff is. But it also all shares, like, a nostalgia, a preciseness, and an anecdotal quality — plus a blend of sheer flippancy with plain reverence — that isn’t reducible to “content.” Maybe St. Louis’s quirky destitution and its remove from all in the world that supposedly “matters” has imbued these artists (and others, for sure) with a sense of how to take Art seriously without being too serious about their works of art. That’s essential, because art is really, really important, just not in the way most of its current institutions and practitioners would have you believe. What this city might be good for, it seems, is helping remove the collective drunk-glasses that audiences need to wear to make Contemporary Art appear politically legitimate and aesthetically fulfilling. Evets demonstrates that an alternative could be local, goofy, well-made, and earnest.
—Troy Sherman
July 29, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present
February 23 , 2024–July 29, 2024
Irving's "dig site" meets the rifts between you and collapsed historical consciousness with humor, sarcasm, softness, and grace. The cold, textured granite of one work in the show, Tomb Raider (archaeology of the present) BLACK GRANITE [1], reminds me of the way Saidiya Hartman tends to begin her passages in Venus in Two Acts: "I could, I would, I must, I cannot, but I want." A curatorial text describing Tomb Raider implies that somewhere on its surface is a QR code; a friend and I searched in vain, only to realize it is halved and unscannable. There is a silence that can't be known, only touched as a process of searching, felt without full facts, glimpsed obliquely. Irving's archaeology will make you taste the desire to exhume and to know, with the proper limits.
—Simone Sparks
July 23, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Paul Chan: Breathers
March 8, 2024–August 11, 2024
Chan is a wildly successful artist, though nothing in this exhibition remotely explains why. A friend of mine called the Breathers (his big nylon fan-bodies) vaguely “moving.” If they are, it’s pure bathos: human forms rendered in a faintly ridiculous and haphazard way, with materials connoting kitschy highway-side commercialism. Some of these Chan calls Bathers, which is a nice little reference to Cezanne and Matisse, though this seems to insist that the awkwardness and tackiness of these objects is in some lineage with those artists’ rendering of bodies. I’m not convinced. Tackiness is not a virtue. Yet Contemporary artists continually deploy it as a weapon against propriety, which is why we are drowning in mediocre camp.
—Sam Jennings
July 18, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Northeast Corner of Nebraska Street and Cherokee Street
Patterhn Ives, Arbolope Studio, and the Cherokee Street Community. Love Bank Park. 2015-2024.
For the decade that it’s been thriving informally as a basketball court and hangout, Love Bank Park has been a welcome resolution to many of the problems besetting Cherokee Street, where human density and actual function remain mismatched. The park's recent rebuilding could have resulted in a static, fancy, off-putting substitute. Instead, the design is spot on. The formalization of the basketball court includes a hardscape plaza where ecological vitality (plants, trees) does not overwhelm social use, as is often the case with so many landscape designs today. The tubular and gridded metal structure suggests enclosure, which is a great change on one of Cherokee’s few formless corners. Since opening in April, the court has been packed — but the plaza with its tables and seating has added a new layer of users. Perhaps the rest of Cherokee Street can learn.
—Michael R. Allen
July 16, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Slingshot: 2024 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition
February 23, 2024–July 29, 2024
MFA programs are sort of like years-long professional development retreats for people who want to be artists. Venn Diagram-wise, “being an artist” and “making great art” don’t necessarily share more than a sliver. The best thing in this MFA show is Lynne Smith’s two-piece installation. It’s a floor-to-ceiling beam painted the same color as the gallery, plus a little bent-up paperclip sticking out of the wall next to it with a piece of string hanging off. The big/small thing it’s doing is phenomenal, plus I choose to read its different kinds of vanishing as some sort of fuck-you to that whole artist-as-professional problem. Jordan Geiger’s sewn white textile is a great drawing and its colors are perfect. Mad Green’s sketches are the best part of their social sculpture.
—Troy Sherman
July 11, 2024
St. Louis, MO
French Curve Gallery and Kingsbury Gallery
John Bjerklie: The St. Louis Years
May 31, 2024–July 28, 2024
Bjerklie's paintings—which range from Diebenkorn-like constructions to cut plywood reliefs—embody a unique fusion of concept and paint. He was a painter-thinker, who found an inherent value in the creative process itself. Art wasn't a means towards something else but a self-evident activity, offering profound meaning and sustenance. This passion shows in his paintings, which are acutely sensitive to color relationships and proportion. On further inspection, many of the canvases in this exhibition are clearly cut and pasted together, in a collage of colorfields. Young artists could learn much from Bjerklie, who constructed his own mythologies as a stimulus for creation, and devoted an entire life to the idea that art is more than merely entertainment.
—Bret Schneider
July 9, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection
February 23, 2024–July 14, 2024
What has long been missing in a St. Louis public museum is the significant episode of Indigenous modernism after 1920 which this exhibition displays. These works were undertaken by artists who forged a new path that both embraced their specific cultural heritages, but also pushed into new and distinctive modern idioms. The first of two galleries boast walls densely hung with a broad range of works whose visual idiom is flat and hieratic in style, and whose subjects range from the observed to the visionary. The second gallery is anchored by Ephemeration, an intense abstract painting by George Morrison in which swaths of blue, salmon, rose, and green are gnarled, layered, and clotted to produce an effect that, to use Morrison’s own term, is “magical.”
—Elizabeth C. Childs
July 5, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Monaco
Every Shiny Thing
June 28, 2024–July 26, 2024
I’m not sure that, discretely, any of the artworks in this show are exceptional, except some of Sarah Knight’s ceramics. But art doesn’t work discretely. We experience every artwork as a node within networks of thoughts, things, and other artworks; this is why we need curators. Every Shiny Thing is expertly curated, in terms of both the selection of works and their arrangement. The ample space between Samantha Sanders’ petite bug drawings, sparsely and irregularly hung across each of Monaco’s three walls, projects out into the gallery’s third dimension, where it’s punctuated all over by an archipelago of floor-bound sculptures and black piles of sand. This results in a cohesion that’s tough to achieve in such a small space with such a disparate range of artworks.
—Troy Sherman
July 4, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Houska Gallery
Nick Schleicher: Baja Blast
May 17, 2024–July 5, 2024
Houska's cram-it-all-in curatorial approach does not tend to serve its art very well. This is especially a problem for Schleicher, whose squeegee method puts his paintings right on the edge of both repetition and decoration. Cramming often makes artworks seem repetitive and decorative. Despite this, a number of individual works stand out, especially an asymmetrical blue-and-green oval and a mid-mitosis pink-and-yellow blob. In all Schleicher’s work, color can seem a bit arbitrary, but these two (and several others) make that a non-issue — even an asset — by being so subtly, arrestingly shaped.
—Troy Sherman
July 1, 2024
St. Louis, MO
The Luminary
Considering St. Louis
May 31, 2024–July 20, 2024
For regional art to develop in a serious way, it would have to be about things other than regionalism. So I'm inspired by the plentiful work which St. Louis artists are making that fries bigger aesthetic fish than what’s tough about being a Midwestern artist. You can hardly tell from Considering St. Louis, though, that this town’s home to any such activity. Instead, the show’s a smattering of works that don't really go together, plus a whole bunch of para-artistic curatorial initiatives about how — wouldya believe it — art happens way out here! Aside from the fact that this meddling brand of curation tends to suck aesthetically, it seems like the only thing the curator could think to say about art in St. Louis is that it's art in St. Louis. This is all especially a shame because a lot of the inclusions are good on their own terms. Taylor Yocom’s video and Tiff Sutton’s photo banners are certainly up to something.
—Troy Sherman
June 29, 2024
Springfield, MO
Springfield Art Museum
Jackson Pollock. Untitled (Landscape). Oil on canvas. c1935.
Tucked away in a back corner of the Springfield Art Museum is a surviving early Pollock, so indebted to his teacher Thomas Hart Benton that it looks like a sketch after one of the elder artist’s paintings. Pollock, who studied with the Missouri luminary in New York, viewed him more as an orthodoxy to react to than a true teacher. Or at least that’s the common narrative: the budding abstract expressionist destroyed most of his early Regionalist works as his personal style blossomed. But this one survives, Benton’s influence running through the funhouse, windswept scene. What works? The impressionistic, fleeting trees in the top left. The lack of bold outlining on the right ridgeline. The use of negative space and the grainy, unpainted canvas that matches the grit of the picture’s frame. But it’s clear why Pollock abandoned this direction. It’s overwhelmingly tan. The inert horse and its donkey companions are put to better use in Going West, another surviving work from this era at the Smithsonian. The trees in the bottom right can’t decide if they belong underwater or consumed by flames. Overall, what’s missing is the unity of substance and texture that fuses the people, land, industry, and animals in Benton’s best work. What’s beautiful is that Pollock would find that same unifying force in his own superficially violent drip paintings, just as unified and twice as deep as his mentor’s work. Perhaps he learned more from his teacher than he thought.
—Ben Zeno
June 25 , 2024
Sauget, IL
NON STNDRD
Key Loop
June 22, 2024–August 17, 2024
The conception for this 12-artist group show—it’s about patterning and change—is thankfully not super academic, but it seems to only have to do with the artworks, like, 65%. The inclusions are for the most part competent crafty things that struggle to contend with how fucking cool and beautiful the exhibition space itself is. (NON STNDRD is a big old ceiling-less warehouse; weather will ruin all the work over the course of the show.) The one piece that unequivocally succeeds, on its own as well as for the exhibition, is Emily Mueller’s The Neutral, a big, painstaking, subtly graded squiggle drawing that’s just sculptural enough to remind you that it’s in a real space, but just enough of an image to not get swallowed up by its surroundings. Plus, I imagine it’ll deteriorate more compellingly than anything else in the show.
—Troy Sherman
June 21, 2024
Algona, IA
123 E State Street
Louis Sullivan. Henry Adams Building. 1912.
Much of what I’ve seen of Sullivan’s late work makes me want to say that he was interested in placing variously slight, mostly rectilinear masses around the inside perimeter of a structure, cutting into its otherwise expansive-feeling and unified interior to suggest both the boundedness and enfolded, infinite complexity of architectural space. In other words, the man liked to sculpt the negative with the positive. It works oppositely in the Henry Adams Building, though, which has a big central kaaba accented by a variety of portals. It’s the least spacious Sullivan interior I’ve seen, but also the most forwardly sculptural. (This is exaggerated by the presence of a crazy amount of original, integral fixtures: chandeliers, lamps, desks, chairs, windows.) The exterior is almost painterly with its integration of brick and terracotta features; its nine windows give it a staggering rhythm.
—Troy Sherman
June 20, 2024
Clinton, IA
Northwest Corner of 5th Avenue and South 2nd Street
Louis Sullivan. Van Allen and Company Department Store. 1913.
As far as I could tell, this building’s been ruined by retrofits over its century of life, nor is it likely that it was an entirely major work of Sullivan’s even when it was new. Its brick upper portion sits a little too massively on its marble base, and the rhythmic order which its windows create seems interrupted, rather than accented, by the tall mullions on its front side. (Given how sensitive are the relations between ornamental parts and structural wholes in Sullivan’s designs, however, it’s possible that my judgment is unduly influenced by all the little things that have been added to the building over the years.) Still, Sullivan’s genius at decorative organicism is palpable in, for instance, the terracotta banding.
—Troy Sherman
June 19, 2024
Cedar Rapids, IA
1340 3rd Avenue SE
Louis Sullivan and W.C. Jones. St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. 1914.
Famously, Sullivan overshot his budget on this commission by some astronomical amount, forcing the church to boot him and hire some lesser guy — W.C. Jones — to simplify and execute his original designs. The resulting structure is a curio: a true Sullivan idea in terms of massing and space, but with basically arbitrary ornamentation and very little of it… the stained glass windows are mass-market and installed upside down! Things like the main stairwell and the education wing’s hallway include the expressive juxtapositions of closed and open spaces that make any Sullivan building what it is. But the prevailing decorative sparseness — and how it makes the building feel almost hollow — proves that ornament isn’t subordinate to whatever’s great about what Sullivan was up to, but an integral part of how space works in his buildings.
—Troy Sherman
June 18, 2024
Cedar Rapids, IA
101 3rd Avenue SW
Louis Sullivan. People’s Savings Bank. 1911.
Now a restaurant, this is certainly the most adventuresome of Sullivan’s late designs. Its interior has been corrupted by a major flood and several tenants over the years who’ve each adapted it for various uses, but a top-notch preservationist community in Cedar Rapids has made sure that the essential spatial character of the erstwhile bank — and much of its ornamentation — has been upkept. As with all of Sullivan’s provincial buildings of the 1910s, this one has an interior distinguished by slight contractions and bold expansions of space, as well precise left-right asymmetries. The ornamentation on the inside is present but imperfectly maintained, while the delicacy with which the exterior surfaces were designed — there are some dozen shades of bricks all sensitively arranged and variously inset — suggests that in its prime this was as fully realized a composition as the master ever made. Four columns around the building’s perimeter extend Sullivan’s full plan into his building’s environs, which works fantastically and is unique among the stuff of his I’ve seen. Perhaps he included these to balance and contain the structure’s reaching second story.
—Troy Sherman
June 11, 2024
Chamberlain, SD
Akta Lakota Museum & Cultural Center
Unknown Artists (Lakota). Yellow Robe Winter Count. Pencil on Muslin. c1880.
Seldom have I felt as unequipped with the tools for dealing with an artwork as I did when I ran into this “winter count” in southeast South Dakota. Winter counts were spiraling pictorial calendars used by Plains tribes to record historical events; this one covers most of the 19th century. Part of the difficulty for me was the apparently total ambivalence which the figures had for their ground, as well as the spiral narrative form, the (I assume) conventional symbolism, and the deceptive simplicity of the figuration. For someone like me who’s been fatted on “naive” and outsider art, it begs to be read like a Bill Traylor, and by those terms its subdued coloration and uncannily coherent arrangement make it nearly a masterwork. But the obvious narrative complexity and rootedness in an elaborated tradition—however transformed by contact and tribulation—force me to admit that accounting for it exclusively in that way would be formalistic.
—Troy Sherman
June 8, 2024
Farmer, SD
Several miles off Exit 350
Father Peter Scheier. St. Peter’s Rock Grotto. 1926-1933.
Father Scheier was no Dobberstein, and Farmer is no West Bend, but this humbler building is still a thing of quality, in a small way. Romanesquely squat and round, it hulks on the Dakota plain like a predator, but also looks sort of lonely. It was a stroke of Scheier’s to leave the peak of his structure open to the air, not only for natural light but because it tempers the thing’s thickness and heaviness without at all curtailing it. Ornamentally, though, it’s less inspired than other American grottoes I’ve seen.
—Troy Sherman
June 4, 2024
West Bend, IA
Middle of nowhere
Father Paul Dobberstein. The Shrine of the Grotto of Redemption. Basically the whole 20th century.
If sublimity is experiencing one’s mind clawing at and failing to grasp the immense entirety of one big object, then Dobberstein’s structure is about as sublime as it gets. Whether or not it’s good art is tough to say, because it’s pretty much in an idiom of its own — it’s the biggest grotto in the world, and the German expat priest spent about 50 years quarrying and rockhounding and designing and masoning to build it. (Construction continued after his death in ’54.) What suggests that, besides being impressive, it might also be great, is the pervasive fineness of its detail, surprising given its enormity. Apart from being an eccentric, Dobberstein was evidently a colorist, placing his pinks and yellows and quartzy whites with what seems to have been enormous care, whether to tee off a spandrel or accent a facade.
—Troy Sherman
June 2, 2024
Omaha, NE
Artists Cooperative Gallery
Constructs and Contours
April 5, 2024–June 2, 2024
There is quite an impressive display of variety and talent at Omaha’s Artists Cooperative Gallery. Upon my recent visit, the pieces on view existed mostly in the gray area between pure art (which we are used to seeing in museums) and pure craft. This endowed the work with a kind of tension: how to approach it—as fine art, or as craft work of the William Morris kind? Perhaps what I saw was a third way, a hybrid of art and craft? The wood assemblages by Kevin McClay (shown above) were one of the highlights; McClay seems to have been able to appropriate Lee Bontecou’s sculpture-on-the-wall idiom to a calmer, less terrifying purpose.
—William Collen
May 28, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Concealed Layers: Uncovering Expressionist Paintings
March 15, 2024–October 27, 2024
Viewers will find reproductions of images produced by x-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, and other kinds of imaging technologies. These illustrate the conservation and investigative work going on behind the scenes at SLAM. Uniformly, the reproductions (thankfully placed right next to the original artworks themselves) provide something I’ve always longed to see more of from museum interpretation: a glimpse into the actual processes of great artists. Clarifying the simplest actions and decisions that contribute to the overall practice of an artist is invaluable for showing people (especially non-artists like myself) why great works of art are important. I genuinely found myself looking at these paintings like I’d never looked at them before, beginning to understand something deeper in the peculiar, sometimes perplexing, decadence and very ugly beauty they evoke.
—Sam Jennings
May 21, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
John Martin. Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. 1812.
This is one of the rare works that comes near to Caspar David Friedrich, or to Shelley, or to any of the other truly central Romantics Proper, in a zone where myth, literature, and nature fuse completely. A lone, tiny figure struggles up enormous inferno-red cliffs; water runs down them, not in proper wet washes, but in arcs and swirls of pure light. The cliffs appear to scale up and backwards forever. The figure is exhausted but the enormity of the world around him suggests he cannot stop. This is the height of “literature” in painting—of the visual figuration of grand narratives of human will and passion.
—Sam Jennings
May 14, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Unknown Artist (Chinese; Liao, Northern Song, or Jin Dynasty). Seated Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Guanyin) of Water-Moon Form. Wood, gesso, and pigment with gilding. 11th-12th century.
According to the legends, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara swore to remain in the material world until all people had been saved. More than one religionist has pointed out Guanyin’s similarities to Christ. I’ve always been enamored of the extraordinarily life-like quality of this particular statue of the figure. Made of wood from nearly a thousand years ago and miraculously well- preserved, it’s beyond stunning. It feels entirely real, as though at any moment it might stand up from its pedestal, or turn its head—at brief rest, rather than taking an eternal respite from the world. Of course, this perfectly befits a near-deity representing worldly compassion.
—Sam Jennings
May 7, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Matisse and the Sea
February 17, 2024–May 12, 2024
Matisse was exemplary of the Italian idea of limpidezza—a light and airy form like the feeling of a breeze blown in from a strange land. This exhibition captures something of that arid genius, highlighting paintings and sculptures influenced by the artist’s time by the sea. Much of Matisse’s genius was in his painting of lines that are as freely spontaneous and languid as they are confident and strong. He imposed on his art a kind of radical finitary sensibility that is more often found in music than painting. The result is a lucid picture plane which the viewer can take in very easily, but without sacrificing critical self-awareness.
—Bret Schneider
May 2, 2024
Jerome, MO
Right off exit 172
Larry Baggett. Trail of Tears Memorial. Late 20th Century.
This art environment is in a small town in south central Missouri, near Rolla. Larry Baggett, late in his life, decided to deck his property with grottos and stiff sculptures when he heard that the Trail of Tears had run past his land. While his Indians are certainly caricatures, there's something enormously touching about some rural white guy learning about a long-past injustice and, out of bigness of heart, devoting the last chunk of his time on earth to commemorating it. The memorial is in slight disrepair and seems unfinished—the sculptures are diffuse and unintegrated with the landscape—but at times has all the unaccountable vigor and inventiveness of the best outsider art: movement enters Baggett's figures in the least likely ways. The best single piece is a flower-ensconced pourer of water near the entrance, whose canted total form seems impossible against the bulkiness of any one of its parts.
—Troy Sherman
April 18, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Delcy Morelos: Interwoven
March 8, 2024–August 4, 2024
Earthly Weaving is a garden path of spice-infused, dirt-covered chain link fences. The closest local analog is Sol LeWitt’s Intricate Wall at Laumeier Sculpture Park, whose compact unnavigability suggests, by comparison, that Weaving’s openness is more of an invitation to adventurism (or entertainment) than an artistic necessity. Likewise, the rest of the work is competent but unchallenging. Some leaning canvases fail to develop their lack of pictorial oomph into sufficiently sculptural effects. A singly-folded, flatly displayed textile, however, stands out. It is Morelos’s only three-dimensional form that seems to be in any sort of productive tension with the techniques that created it.
—Troy Sherman
April 15, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
On Earth
March 8, 2024–August 4, 2024
Two of these five films—Rivane Neuenschwander’s Quarta Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue and Ana Mendieta’s Alma, Silueta en Fuego—struck me as purely rote. Works of their monotonous and symbolically simplistic stripe just wouldn’t cut it anywhere outside of a Contemporary museum. Jeffrey Gibson’s To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth has its moments but mostly lives up to its terrible title. Sky Hopinka’s Mnemonics of Shape and Reason does not live up to its terrible title: it contends beautifully with the primal sensual pleasures produced by filmed motion synced with sound. Ali Cherri’s inclusion, a traditional short documentary, also deserves to be seen.
—Sam Jennings
April 12, 2024
Omaha, NE
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Neo-Custodians: Woven Narratives of Heritage, Cultural Memory, and Belonging
December 9, 2023–April 14, 2024
Curator Nneoma Ilogu’s Neo-Custodians is among the best shows ever held at Bemis, matched only by Risa Puleo’s Monarchs (2018). It features global heavy-hitters like El Anatsui and Yinka Shonibare, as well as regional artists like Layo Bright and Celeste Butler. The works, inspired by West African and African Diasporic weaving traditions, have one throughline: texture. Though stylistically diverse, all are generally muted in color. A video by Enam Gbewonyo, Under the Skin of a Guild, is particularly captivating. It memorializes the Zong Massacre of 1781, wherein 130 kidnapped Africans were thrown overboard a slave ship. The video’s sound and Gbewonyo’s movements are gut-wrenching and make one feel physical revulsion at these horrors.
—Jonathan Orozco
April 4, 2024
Omaha, NE
UNO Art Gallery (University of Nebraska, Omaha)
Juried Student Art Exhibition
March 8, 2024-April 5, 2024
This show's standout piece is Hayden Johnston's triptych, The Weight of Womanhood. It presents a striking set of ambiguities: in the first panel, is the mother supporting her child during an acrobatic move, or restraining a tantrum? The second panel evokes the incessant chaos of motherhood with its scattered toys and contradictory thoughts. The third seems at first to be full of calm, but I wonder if the woman's head is full of thoughts as disorderly as the previous two panels. The triptych invites an array of speculative interpretations: the title, for instance, encourages us to contemplate how the roles of "woman" and "mother" contrast and overlap. The exhibition contains several other fine works. Perhaps the most technically accomplished is Allie Piersanti's pencil drawing, Strawberry Jello.
—William Collen
April 1, 2024
St. Louis, MO
One Metropolitan Square
Lincoln Frederick Perry, Urban Odyssey, 7-panel mural, 1987.
Ensconced inside of downtown St. Louis’ ur-Postmodern corporate tower, Metropolitan Square, Perry’s set of murals seems unfortunately neglected in civic consciousness. Urban Odyssey offers an immersive update to Homer’s epic poem, through which any of the building’s (male, white, bearded) office-dwellers can imagine his daily commute as an exotic journey skirting death itself. The mural-cycle may first seem like a tasteless relic. Yet Perry’s desire to connect the potentially alien, ahistorical mass of Metropolitan Square to the local built environment offers a steady, subtle critique of a 1980s corporate culture that regarded place as fungible.
—Michael R. Allen
March 28, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Monaco
Sage Mend: Tender Growl
March 1, 2024–March 31, 2024
In lifting her motifs from some of the greatest artworks ever, Mend set herself up for failure. But standing your ground against the monstrous enormity of art’s whole history despite the unavoidable fact that old masterpieces will hand you your ass is the whole fucking point of being an artist. Mend is an artist. The best thing her tapestries do is interrupt their black surfaces with all these errant shocks of white thread. These seem to be updates to her medieval models’ profusions of floral ornament (millefleurs). The effect is that her scenes convey a motion, despite their flatness, that’s almost cinematic.
—Troy Sherman
March 21, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
The Body in Pieces
February 16, 2024–April 15, 2024
The Kemper’s presentation of artists who responded to the modern world’s complexity through fragmentary figuration is, like the museum itself, small but filled with quality work. Besides two representative pieces from the master of piecemeal bodies (Picasso), there are refreshingly uncharacteristic works from modern luminaries (Miro’s early Portrait of Josep F. Ràfols, Klee’s Timid Ones Together). The standout is Edward John Stevens’ Arrival of the Village Princess. It’s a beautiful mess, pen-thin oil paint lines giving it the texture of a recovered wooden tableau. A plume of newspaper-print smoke below a blazing Black Hole Sun anchors it in fractured modernity.
—Ben Zeno
March 19, 2024
Omaha, NE
Fred Simon Gallery
Yun Shin: Studying and Transcribing
February 9, 2024–April 3, 2024
When we think of abstract expressionism, we often think first of the splattered gestures of Pollock or the tormented figures of de Kooning. But let’s not forget that precise and exact repetition can also be expressive. Yun Shin’s meticulous grids of lines and dots are an expression of calm, order, and perfectionism just as well as Pollock’s drips express frenetic energy and abandon.
—William Collen
March 16, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis University Museum of Art
Legacy
March 1, 2024–May 6, 2024
From SLUMA, another bizarrely curated and conceived exhibition of mostly fundamentally sound work, with a handful of fucking bangers that make the show worth a visit. Everything was gifted by some guy named Merwin, who seems to have been the type of sorta-rich rich dude who’s sorta got taste so he builds up a hodge-podge collection of middling large-edition prints by famous artists in their late career. The bangers: a playful, palpable Rauschenberg that’s shaped weird; two crazy modular James Siena prints; a seizure of a Corot etching that might be a masterpiece.
—Troy Sherman
March 13, 2024
Omaha, NE
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Paolo Arao: Reverberations
December 9, 2023–April 14, 2024
Arao’s exhibition is easy to like, especially if you’re into Bauhaus patterns or hard-edge painting. Though his textiles intend monumentality, they feel intimate—almost physically small—as a result of their quilt-like construction. They behave like wallpaper, lying as flat as sewn fabric can lie to cover the gallery’s walls. As planes of color the work is successful, but it appears hung and even constructed poorly, which makes me wonder: what about this work demanded that it be made of fabric? Would it have been stronger had it simply been painted on the walls? Pleasing at first glance, Arao’s textiles have an awkwardness introduced by their warping that hinders extensive engagement with color.
—Jonathan Orozco
March 11, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Kemper Art Museum
Santiago Sierra: 52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City’s Air
February 23, 2024–July 29, 2024
Sierra is a master at making the impossibility of art’s autonomy into his art’s autonomous form. That is, he turns art’s imbrication with life into properly aesthetic effects. In this recent piece, he’s arranged into a gradient grid canvases that have been decorated by a megacity’s pollution. The grid has a minimalist’s precision, while the aleatory dots and slashes across its canvases contribute undercutting visual complexity. Of itself, there’s a pleasantness to the ensemble. This pleasantness becomes a frisson when one recalls that it was an artist’s unscrupulous collaboration with literally killing social forms that brought the piece about.
—Troy Sherman
March 9, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Gallery 3840
Rialda Mustić: Waking State
March 1, 2024–April 1, 2024
Mustić’s show might’ve had a curator; there are too many things for not a lot of gallery. Even the worst of it, though, is brimming with a creativeness that’s not super common, while the best is working towards some very good stuff. If there’s a line through the show, it’s Mustić’s tendency to lock some messy substrate into place with an erratic but hard and linear system over the top of it. This is how ceramic relates to fabric in several sculptures, and how figure relates to ground in the paintings. Controlling this relationship would benefit the work.
—Troy Sherman
March 6, 2024
Omaha, NE
The Union for Contemporary Art
Leslie Diuguid: Meet me at the fence ok bye
February 10, 2024–March 9, 2024
Printmaker Leslie Duiguid’s solo exhibition has hits and misses. One wall features mostly prints made of textiles. These attempts are not that visually engaging; they feel flat and utilize colors that aren’t especially harmonious or thought-out. The other wall’s more abstracted works are strong, especially a set of handprints accompanied by an auxiliary piece letting us know that they came from the artist’s hands when she was three. Exploiting the universal emotional directness of manual impressions—as artists from the Cueva de las Manos painters to Betye Saar have done—these works are the show’s most conceptually compelling.
—Jonathan Orozco
March 5, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Francisco Zurbarán. St. Francis Contemplating a Skull. Oil on canvas. c1635.
Zurbarán’s painting feels more liminal than the declarative work I’d expect from an altarpiece. It’s solemn, insular, geometric — St. Francis as Hamlet, but the skull is cradled facing inward, rather than held aloft. We can hardly see its sockets; it’s more sphere than skeleton. The saint’s eyes are even less visible. He is a monument with starched folds. We see almost none of his skin: firm hands, an oddly gleaming thumb, bulbous toes. These toes undercut the effect of St. Francis as Imposing Triangle. His stance is no power pose, but staggered, uncertain. Fitting for a man contemplating death.
—Ben Zeno
February 29, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Wangechi Mutu: My Cave Call
January 12, 2024–March 31, 2024
Mutu's video isn't quite kitsch, but it panders. It's a Bosch spinoff—three long takes represent heaven, earth, and hell—with a child's voiceover providing apocalypticism and woo-woo earthy stuff by turns. Compositionally each shot is nice if unexceptional, full and precise such that the work of looking seems to have been done for you. (Corny CGI wisps have a similarly facilitative effect.) When “fine artists” make films, the gallery context apologizes for stuff that would never fly in a theater. This is how Mutu’s gotten away with a work that, whether structurally or visually, develops nothing from its perfectly attractive substrate.
—Troy Sherman
February 20, 2024
St. Louis, MO
The Luminary
Moving Stories in the Making: An Exhibition of Migration Narratives
February 3, 2024–March 30, 2024
It bears repeating (and repeating) that art's relationship with changing the world is far more complex than political Contemporary Art would make us believe. If artworks have changing power, it's only through being artistically good. Luckily, one of the seven pieces here (as art, if not as politics) rules. Another works pretty well. Best is Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya's Of Soil and Sky, a tall red tapestry-and-vessels installation that gives unclouded (if literal) expression to the joys of cultural belonging and the difficulties in attaining it. Second is a set of painted wood shapes by Mee Jey, well-made and -installed but a bit pretty.
—Troy Sherman
February 15, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Bellefontaine Cemetery
Louis Sullivan. Wainwright Tomb. 1892.
Sullivan might be the greatest American artist. The Wainwright Tomb is among the greatest things he did. It's almost squat with its sphinx-arms digging out into earth from its grounded cubic gut, but also airy, a dome atop a song of tan smooth swathes. Its inside is a play of planes that set off soaring curves; it's hardly real how flat the floor feels, how huge the dome's negative space. The carved exterior ornament and the tiles inside are exact and unbridled in equal measure. Seldom did Sullivan use color to such an effect as within this perfect structure.
—Troy Sherman
February 12, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Parapet/Real Humans
David Muenzer: Henge
December 14, 2023–February 9, 2024
Note: MAQ discloses a potential conflict of interest; the author of this review is a friend of and collaborator with Parapet’s gallerist.
Muenzer's show was about a half-dozen small vaginal ceramics hung all around and illuminated from behind like light fixtures. The installation's conception felt correct, especially the idea not to hide any electrical cords, which made the earthy-ness of the individual artworks seem a bit less highfalutin than it could've. But no one piece really held its own except maybe the crumbly porcelains, and the show as a whole was pretty easy to "get." This might've been because ceramics are too immemorial to be convincingly conceptual with, or because execution-wise it was all just a little cute.
—Troy Sherman
February 6, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Monaco
Will Driscoll: Memory Palace
January 19, 2024–February 10, 2024
Will Driscoll has an intuition for color — specifically foreground and background relations — and uses it not merely to stage the quotidian, but to formalize the informal aesthetic coincidences that occur to aesthetically open minds. In one photo, a plane rolls by in the distance, and a dreamy haze of sunset ochres and oranges is manifest. In another, a play of brown liquid ejaculates into the atmosphere against a background of sky-blue, referencing the art history of fountains à la Bruce Nauman. We are keen to discern in these works the colorful sublimity of life that waits for us in things.
—Bret Schneider
January 30, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Saint Louis Art Museum
Aso Oke: Prestige Cloth from Nigeria
September 29, 2023–March 10, 2024
From the Saint Louis Art Museum’s permanent collection comes a loose group of examples of a form of Yoruba textile work called Aso Oke (pronounced “ah-shō ōkay”). The exhibition is initially circumspect about what exactly constitutes the three important types of material within the tradition (sanyan, raw silk; alaari, silk dyed magenta; and etu, indigo). Once the viewer is pointed away from some merely interesting examples of these materials and towards a trio of male garbs representing each type, then the show works. Though the exhibition suffers because we are merely told about the process these remarkable craftspeople undertake — rather than being shown any detailed examples of it — it’s hard not to be briefly dazzled by the results.
—Sam Jennings
January 26, 2024
St. Louis, MO
October 20, 2023–April 7, 2024
Ellsworth Kelly was a good, not a great, painter. His line, when it’s on, is immaculate, but despite his reputation and the point of the paintings, I’m not convinced he was quite the consummate colorist. (Spectrum II, SLAM’s huge 13-paneled rainbow-y painting from 1967 which I’ve never really understood, is case in point that his color is often more conceived than it is achieved.) Several floral line drawings from as early as the 1950s — which are light, poised, and very beautiful — clarify that if Kelly was anything, he was a master draftsman. A large blue-on-red Rothko-ish painting steals the show.
—Troy Sherman