Openings + Performances: Grand Center Arts District

Celebrate their Fall Exhibitions, including Counterpublic Projects:

• Juanita McNeely at the Contemporary Art Museum
• Tony Cokes at the Contemporary Art Museum
• Benjamin Patterson at Park-Like

Artists and curators will speak about projects and activate artworks with performance.

A co-founder of Fluxus and its sole African American member, Benjamin Patterson consistently treated the score as an ethical prompt: a call to act, listen, and compose social relations anew.

Starting in Spring Church, local musician Damon Smith will perform Patterson’s work Variations for Double-Bass (1961). Moving to Park-Like, there will be a special performance of the installation When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2016–17/2026) an amplified artwork installed throughout the garden. The artwork includes frog sounds and readings by St. Louis contributors Father Panagiotis Kostoulas, Sonia Zamanou, Alkistis Lappas, Lyndsey Ellis, Kayla Reed, Charlie Farrell, Tef Poe, and Nevada Nieves. You are invited to join the symphony of sound by participating in a live performance.

The permanent work The Switch Which, created by Fitch and Trecartin for Counterpublic 2026, embraces this surplus and makes it its central subject. Installed near the Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s Big Top circus tent in St. Louis’s Grand Center Arts District, the permanent sculptural stage is a gift to the city. Explicitly designed to be touched, occupied, activated, and continually reinvented by anyone who encounters it, the work is a sculptural theater open to performances, stories, plays, screenings, readings, and any other creative acts that the community chooses to host within it. For the opening performance Fitch and Trecartin are activating the stage with St. Louis artists to showcase the variety of ways to activate the artwork.

To RSVP, please complete the Opening Weekend registration form.