The Midwest Art Quarterly
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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
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
Saint Louis Art Museum
Ellsworth Kelly
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