Meet Me in St. Louis

Jamie Lee Harris is a St. Louis–based artist focused on the African American diaspora and the forgotten histories of Black rural America. Divided into three parts, the mural Meet Me in St. Louis tells three stories tied to the lineage of colonialism and racism embedded in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. On the left is a portrait of bronze medalist track-and-field athlete George Poage, the first Black man to win two medals at the 1904 Summer Olympic Games. The middle panel depicts a miner from Mill Creek Valley, a historic Black neighborhood in St. Louis that was erased in the mid-1950s in the name of urban renewal. The right panel references the costume style from the 1945 film Meet Me in St. Louis. In Harris’s version, the woman wears a dress constructed of quilt panels of reused fabric scraps. The kind of handmade clothing recorded and transmitted memories as Black people migrated westward from 1910 to 1970 to escape the racial segregation and violence of Jim Crow laws in the South.