Coyote Time Convening: Climate Futures and Infrastructural Imaginaries

Save the date for a centerpoint Coyote Time convening on October 23-25th focused around Climate Futures and Infrastructural Imaginaries. The convening will feature the unveiling of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s permanent stage environment as a gift to St. Louis, Malcolm Peacock’s commissioned performances and conversations, artist tours, workshops, and shared meals throughout the weekend. There will also be a closed-door climate action working session for arts organizations and organizers, so be in touch if this may be of interest for you.

As part of Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time, this three-day convening brings together artists, writers, organizers, designers, scientists, cultural leaders, and community practitioners to explore climate as a lived reality and a site for worldbuilding. Through conversations, performances, artist tours, workshops, and shared meals, the convening traces a path from the immediate conditions of climate disaster to the speculative and practical infrastructures needed to sustain more just futures. Taking place across Counterpublic 2026 exhibition sites throughout St. Louis, the convening invites participants to experience the exhibition connecting climate action with cultural imagination.

Building on themes of Coyote Time and Counterpublic’s ambitious climate action framework for the exhibition, the convening explores focus areas of Climate as Lived Reality, Climate Infrastructures, Worldbuilding, Embodied Knowledge, and Institutional Responsibility.

Exhibiting artists and curators premier artworks, present performances, and sit down in conversation to discuss their work. To open the Convening, artist duo Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch premiere The Switch Witch, a major new permanent commission in the form of a public stage environment gifted to the people of St. Louis, while multidisciplinary artist Malcolm Peacock presents a new performance-run across East St. Louis. Along the Mississippi Riverfront, audiences will experience performances by Kite and the Indonesian collective Tromarama, activating the river as a site for gathering, reflection, and ecological imagination. Visitors are invited to share a communal lunch by Rirkrit Tiravanija and his team of collaborators at IISTL, participate in artist- and curator-led tours across Counterpublic’s citywide exhibition, and join a conversation with the rural art and ecology collective M12 Studio at the National Building Arts Center exploring how artists can cultivate resilient civic and environmental infrastructures.

The convening also brings together community leaders in conversations that connect artistic practice with lived experience. Author and activist Leah Thomas, whose groundbreaking book The Intersectional Environmentalist has reshaped conversations around climate justice, delivers a keynote conversation. Local filmmaker Cami Thomas joins Dr. LJ Punch to discuss disaster recovery, mutual aid, and community preparedness in the wake of climate crises. As part of the convening, Counterpublic will also share its Climate Impact Plan for arts organizers with the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative and Field Forms, outlining new approaches to sustainable exhibition-making, low-carbon visitor experiences, and institutional accountability. Together, these conversations, performances, and collective experiences position Coyote Time as a living laboratory for imagining and building the cultural, ecological, and civic infrastructures needed to meet the climate crisis.

The full convening schedule, including additional participants and events, will be released in September 2026.

Envisioning a shared near future with boldness and hope in a time of global upheaval, Coyote Time brings together fifty new artist commissions and selected historical artworks presented at public sites throughout the city. Counterpublic’s third triennial edition, Coyote Time, will present daring new artist projects, public programs and events, and long-lasting civic initiatives centering urgent crises including climate, education, and immigration. Explore the exhibition.