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.

Coyote Time derives from the title of artist Alice Bucknell’s commissioned artwork for the exhibition, marking the moment in a video game when a character leaps off a cliff and is suspended in midair, unsure of what comes next. This moment of anticipation guides the exhibition, where uncertainty creates a space for experimentation and possibility. The artworks and ideas presented in the exhibition invite audiences to inhabit Coyote Time: To take the risk of jumping into the unknown with faith, purpose, and intentionality.

The Mississippi Riverfront

The Ville Neighborhood

International Institute

National Building Arts Center

Museums and Galleries

Our vision for the 2026 exhibition is to reflect the interests and imaginations of St. Louisans and amplify ideas for the St. Louis we hope to see. Over the course of 2024 we engaged over 1,400 individuals and collected 775 pieces of written feedback at events across the city. Feedback centered joy, the importance of intergenerational learning, and hope in creative collaboration. Learn more in our 2024-2025 Community Report. Focus areas include:

• Climate action
• Interconnection
• Native sovereignty
• Joy and resilience
• Intergenerational learning
• Expanded kinship and solidarity

Drawn from the title of artist Alice Bucknell’s commission for Counterpublic 2026, Coyote Time presents fifty artist commissions and a selection of historical reinterpretations in sites throughout St. Louis. The term ‘coyote time’ comes from video games, marking the moment in games when a character leaps off a cliff only to be held suspended in midair. In this uncertain hang time, the player can make one of three decisions: they can jump back to the ledge; do nothing and accept the risk of falling, or move forward and trust that a platform will appear.

At this moment, as protections are systematically being stripped both in the US and abroad, the risk of plummeting is increasingly the norm. In St. Louis, the exhibition emerges fully within raveling uncertainties of this social, political, ecological, and technological moment. Each of our key sites for Counterpublic 2026 has endured a series of fires, storms, and governmental pressures, posing an ever more prescient need to reimagine and rebuild within this period of global change. Coyote Time aims to offer viewers temporary suspension during which individual and systemic adjustments can occur.

Coyote Time proposes both a curatorial methodology and a way of existing in the world, jumping before the next platform has fully materialized and doing so with faith, purpose, and intentionality. We are discovering a collective process and building it in real time. We offer strategies to host risk and conjure other futures. We approach the exhibition with compositional devices set in perpetual coyote time: scores, notation, staging—all forms of preparatory and anticipatory work.

Through this edition, we interpret Coyote Time as it is used variably across myths, belief systems, and formal lineages. Across both individual and collective subjectivities. Coyotes are adaptive, inherently curious creatures, attuned to urgency. They are resilient and rove fluidly in between the natural and built environments, crossing manmade mores and borders. They disperse widely only to regather seasonally. Up in the hills, the coyote throws its voice to a collective echo. In Indigenous cosmologies, the Coyote is a potent figure, a savvy shapeshifter and guide towards transformation. A bridge between worlds. The coyote is a trickster who subverts expected paths for daily life. It is an interstitial worldbuilder.

What worlds are made in the space of the leap? What other paths become clear, and what platforms arrive in time for footfall? What systems can be rewritten and what means invented to cheat expectations? We play and prowl, camouflage and pounce, falter then cruise, jump then hunt, refuse, and restart.

The ledge appears again; the time of the coyote has come.