Coming Soon
Counterpublic 2026 is coming Sep 10–Dec 12, 2026.
video
About the Exhibition
Exhibition Overview
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.
Exhibition Locations
Anchor Sites
The Mississippi Riverfront
The Ville Neighborhood
Tower Grove
National Building Arts Center and NON STNDRD
Museums and Galleries
Events
Preview
Location
2026 Curatorial Ensemble
Staff Curatorial Support
Exhibition Priorities
Priorities for Coyote Time
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
Curatorial Statement
The term “coyote time” comes from platform video games and marks the moment when a character leaps off a cliff yet remains temporarily suspended in midair. In this hang time, the player can make one of three decisions: jump back to the ledge, do nothing and accept the risk of falling, or move forward and trust that another platform will propel them to the next level. Designers created coyote time to write forgiveness into their systems’ physics. This mechanic grants players a respite during which they can recalibrate to strategize their next move. Good systems hold their own rules lightly. Poor systems are rigid and inflexible. In this social, political, and ecological moment, we must engineer coyote time ourselves.
Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time draws from the eponymous title of Alice Bucknell’s commission for this edition of the triennial, which presents fifty new commissions alongside a selection of historical recontextualizations in sites across St. Louis, stretching from north to south, east toward the Mississippi, and across the river to Sauget, Illinois. Our edition proposes coyote time as both a curatorial methodology and a way of existing in the world: jumping before the next platform has fully materialized. We approach the exhibition with compositional devices set in canny coyote time—scores, notation, staging—all forms of preparatory, anticipatory work.
As rights and protections are stripped away both in the United States and abroad, the risk of plummeting increasingly feels like the norm. In St. Louis, this exhibition emerged from specific material and historic contexts. Each of our key sites has endured a series of fires, storms, and governmental pressures. These rapid crises stack atop systemically fraught conditions: the slower yet insidious violence of redlining and rezoning, environmental degradation, and calculated disinvestment that lets structures fail so they can be renamed as blight. The risk of falling is not evenly distributed. Describing precarity can draw more attention to symptoms of systemic failure than to the power relations and historical processes that produce them. With cunning, coyote time intervenes in these structures. It provisionally diverts their temporal orderings, and within this drawn-out moment, briefly defers their logic.
Coyotes are adaptive, inherently curious creatures, attuned to urgency. They are resilient and rove fluidly between natural and built environments, crossing human-made mores and borders. They disperse widely, only to regather seasonally. Up in the hills, the coyote throws its voice to a collective echo. Coyote time offers a modest and precise mechanic: a temporary suspension, a purposeful diversion, a window during which both individual and systemic adjustments become possible. Through this edition of Counterpublic, we invoke coyote time alongside the canine trickster as it is conceived variably across myths, belief systems, and formal lineages, and across both individual and collective subjectivities.
The commissions and historical works presented here share an orientation toward the near future as something both already present and perpetually out of reach. They move toward protocols that shape what can be known and who gets to know it, as well as shifting the terms of participation in these programmatic processes. In the neighborhood of The Ville, a selection of commissions reconstruct civic and environmental spaces following the devastating 2025 tornado. Other works commemorate figures from the area around the historic Sumner High School, as well as trace the institution’s radical pedagogical genealogies. At the International Institute of St. Louis, which provides critical resources for newly arrived migrants, artists foreground future visions of home alongside culinary and infrastructural interventions. Nearby, at Tower Grove Park, St. Louisians’ dreams are given shape in a public artwork. Augmenting these sites, including Counterpublic’s headquarters, are collaborations with cultural partners—including the Saint Louis Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, and The Luminary—where artists offer provisionary blueprints and scores for near futures born from time gained via canine trickery. Along the Mississippi Riverfront, multisensory commissions engage sonic, olfactory, and kinetic registers that alert us to, and intervene in, present and inherited conditions. Finally, east of the river at the National Building Arts Center and NON STNDRD, artists interpose their works in archives from the built environment as well as within toxic ecological conditions. Taken together, these artists work from within specific lineages, formal traditions, and bodies of knowledge that precede and exceed this exhibition. We do not position their commissions as props for a curatorial argument or as evidence of a shared vision. What the artists share, rather, is a practice of working astutely within conditions they did not choose, building platforms and models of temporary relief that can hold what they cannot predict.
The coyote is a trickster who subverts expected paths for daily life. It is an interstitial worldbuilder who does not resolve the contradiction between order and chaos, but lives in the gap between the two. In Indigenous cosmologies, the Coyote is a potent figure: a savvy shapeshifter and guide toward transformation, a bridge between worlds. In contemporary Mexico, the coyote is a liminal and sometimes dangerous guide across borders. In Looney Tunes cartoons, Wile E. Coyote is a tragically persistent deluder. We invoke the trickster not as a figure of heroic stewardship or redemptive promise, nor as a sentinel of the imaginary carrying the world from collapse to transformation, but as something less consoling, potentially useful, and insistently, ambiguously shapeshifting. Taking after the coyote as a cunning scoundrel, the artists’ commissions in Counterpublic 2026 propose audacious, provisional, and revisable modes.
A good game models the rules of a world while holding those rules loose enough to play with. A maquette proposes what a building could become if a different logic were adopted. A pulley changes the direction of force, functioning as a multiplier through an exchange between force and distance. A sauna is a literal hot box and a Pandora’s box of uncertain transformation. A large-scale reliquary within the site of a former aquarium metabolizes it toward possible future forms. An artificial frog pond resonates with ribbits, building to a crescendo of riotous potential. Floating pants, suspended like flags, embody pedagogues in a school without students. Rose-tinted surveillance mirrors upturn infrastructures of control, transforming an empty lot into a queer space of resistance. Benches stage respite as an integral aspect of everyday infrastructure and a productive moment of bodily suspension. A collective run rehearses mobile forms of sovereignty. A meal is an offering and an obligation.
Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time asks: What worlds are made in the space of the leap? What other paths become clear, what platforms can be built just in time for footfall, and what mechanisms can materialize in the time of suspension? What systems can be rewritten, and what new means invented to cheat expectations? We play and prowl, camouflage and pounce, falter then cruise, jump then hunt, refuse and restart.
Sniff and howl: the time of the coyote has come.
Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time Curatorial Ensemble
Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, Wanda Nanibush
Coyote Time Full Map
02 Appreciate [Riverfront]
![Appreciate [Riverfront]](https://counterpublic-media.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/03153048/Leatherbury_Recent-work_01-1024x683.jpg)
Artist Brianna Leatherbury
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Rammed earth, reclaimed phosphate, land
2026 On view
03 Melted Destiny
Artist Yatika Starr Fields
Address 1450, South Wharf Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63104
Details Exterior acrylic latex paint, spray paint
2026 On view
04 Site Memory, Recollecting Resistance and Returning Home
Artist Yatika Starr Fields
Address 200, South Broadway, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Printed vinyl
2026 On view
05 Who Builds Anything in This Country?
Artist Glenn Ligon
Address 801, North Leonor K Sullivan Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Handmade bricks
2026 Permanent Artwork On view
06 Siren Song
Artist Anika Todd
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Municipal tornado sirens, field recordings of the Mississippi River
2026 On view
07 Utilities
Artist Cooper Jacoby
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Wood telephone poles, epoxy resin, fiberglass, acrylic, clear coat, resin-stabilized burl wood, bone, EPDM rubber, aluminum, speakers, screens, electronics
2026 On view
08 Proximities
Artist Emma McCormick Goodhart
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Sandstone (Arkansas), limestone marble, mica-encrusted granite, druzy quartz and red earth (all Missouri), CAVE 0 fragrance oil and eau de parfum, mitti attar (wet clay absolute), scent diffusers, neon, high-density polyurethane, electric scent diffusers, Osage orthography.
2026 On view
09 𐓰𐓪𐓰𐓘 𐓤𐓪𐓰𐓘
Artist Emma McCormick Goodhart
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Neon, metal, Osage orthography
2026 On view
10 slippin’ into darkness
Artist Guadalupe Rosales
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details 1991 Honda Accord, Tropical Glitz dragon fruit lollipop paint, sound, LED
2026 On view
11 Wíhaŋyablapi (of St. Louis)
Artist Kite
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Textile, video, mixed media, dreams
2026 On view
12 Porous Streams Within
Artist Lisa Alvarado + Joshua Abrams
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Wood, canvas, acrylic paint, fabric trims, leather lace, natural linen, bells, sewn vinyl and plastic, dried river grass, colored water, sand, window vinyl, ripstop, motors, multichannel sound
2026 On view
13 RE_ — resilience, reclamation, rethinking… _DE — depression, deprivation, decentralisation… da_RE — change, experience, respect, sense…
Artist Sissel Tolaas
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Historical crate, replicated smell molecules, compressors (6 tubings), theater seats (indoor and outdoor); invisible archive of the disappearing city, sauna room and theater chairs, locker rooms
2026 On view
14 Shields Green
Artist Vaughn Davis Jr.
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Acrylic, dye, glitter, pigment, aerosol on canvas
2026 On view
15 Parasiting
Artist Won Ju Lim
Address 101, Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Laser engraving on glass panels, sound. This installation allows ten individuals at a time. Parasiting is navigable by flashlight. Be mindful as you enter the darkened room. Flashlights are provided at the welcome desk.
2026 On view
16 Living Room
Artist Tromarama
Address 700, North 2nd Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Soprano recorder, melodica, TV monitor, wind chime, ladder, fan, chairs, DC fan, hose, clamp, magic arm, custom computer program, AI-generated text, discarded objects
2026 On view
17 Coyote Time [Laclede’s Landing]
![Coyote Time [Laclede’s Landing]](https://counterpublic-media.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/27112138/greatway_south_present-1024x576.png)
Artist Alice Bucknell
Address 700, North 2nd Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Video game
2026 On view
18 Cheap Mirror
Artist LI Yi-Fan
Address 700, North 2nd Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Runtime: 05:30
2026 On view
19 The bow in the cloud
Artist Stephen Andrews
Address 624, North 2nd Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Jacquard weaving and vinyl print
2026 On view
20 Hereafter
Artist Rebecca Belmore
Address 624, North 2nd Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63102
Details Photographic Installation
2026 On view
22 Appreciate [The Ville]
![Appreciate [The Ville]](https://counterpublic-media.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/03160745/Leatherbury_Recent-work_01-1-1024x683.jpg)
Artist Brianna Leatherbury
Address 2510, Belle Glade Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Rammed earth, reclaimed phosphate, land
2026 On view
23 A Place to Put Your Things
Artist Sandra Brewster
Address 2424, Belle Glade Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Powder-coated steel, stainless steel
2026 On view
24 Margaret Honda
Artist Margaret Honda
Address 4155, Kennerly Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Brick, composite deck boards
2026 On view
25 People’s Art and Recreation Center (PARC)
Artist People’s Art and Recreation Center
Address 4206, Kennerly Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
2026 On view
26 Miss Othmar School for Teachers: Simmons Elementary School
Artist Timmy Simonds
Address 4318, Saint Louis Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Decommissioned parachute, facade corner mount
2026 On view
28 Notebook of Return
Artist Jean-Marc Bullet + Céline Semaan
Address 2401, Annie Malone Drive, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Simultaneous harvest at six gardens around the Great Loop. Notebook of Return is partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art.
2026 On view
29 Reflected Memory on Traced Ground
Artist Occupy Vacancy
Address 4016, Enright Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63108
Details Brick, mirror, door, flowers, shrubs, trees
2026 On view
30 Meet Me in St. Louis
Artist Jamie Lee Harris
Address 4140, Doctor Martin Luther King Drive, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details Wood, brick, gold luster
2026 On view
31 Arrow Radio
Artist Dail Chambers
Address 4140, Doctor Martin Luther King Drive, St. Louis, Missouri, 63113
Details By appointment only. More details below.
2026 On view
32 FUTURE HOUSEHEADS, THIS WAS TU’S HOUSE
Artist Alan Nakagawa
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details Vinyl prints, metal stands, oral history studio, trailer, sound sofa, sound system, over fifty oral histories of Upstairs Lounge community members, ten instrumental portraits of Upstairs Lounge, six remixes by local DJs, hundreds of archival images from Upstairs Lounge community members
2026 On view
33 Abetare (House 67, Rainbow St.)
Artist Petrit Halilaj
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details Stainless steel, patina
2026 On view
34 Souvenir
Artist Mee Jey
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details Found fabric, memorabilia
2026 Permanent Artwork On view
36 Drawings from the workshops with kids
Artist Petrit Halilaj
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details Crayon, marker on paper
2026 On view
37 CLEANSE (Portal)
Artist Rachel Youn
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details Aluminum, AC motor, hardware, nylon, UHMW, lattice, artificial wisteria
2026 On view
38 (open kitchen)
Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija
Address 3401, Arsenal Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63118
Details A lot of people
2026 On view
39 SLAG GARDEN
Artist Chris Carl
Address 2300, Falling Springs Road, Sauget, Illinois, 62206
Details Bronze fountain, data conduit, restoration plants, water, offline LLM, sediment sock, wooden pallets, slag, concrete, cameras, speakers
2026 On view
40 Fiesta de la Raíces
Artist Carolina Caycedo
Address 2300, Falling Springs Road, Sauget, Illinois, 62206
Details Powder-coated steel, steel rod, aluminum wire, wood, paint, rope, resin, paracord, beads, sisal, hemp, jute
2026 On view
42 CLEANSE (Devour)
Artist Rachel Youn
Address 2300, Falling Springs Road, Sauget, Illinois, 62206
Details Steel, aluminum, AC motor, hardware, nylon, UHMW, lattice, artificial kudzu ivy
2026 On view
43 Monuments to Lateral Knowledge
Artist Sebastián Llovera
Address 2300, Falling Springs Road, Sauget, Illinois, 62206
Details 3D-printed clay, fabric ribbons, copper, plant-based resin
2026 On view
44 When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti
Artist Benjamin Patterson
Address 3713, Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63108
Details Various recordings, 16-channel sound field
2026
45 Roses
Artist Tom Burr
Address 3724, Grandel Square, St. Louis, Missouri, 63108
Details Powder-coated steel fencing, red-tinted acrylic security mirrors, powder-coated steel folding chairs, direct printing on aluminum composite material, gravel, hardware
2026 On view
46 The forgotten little candy in my pocket, and.
Artist Ali Eyal
Address 3526, Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63103
Details Real and fake plastic bullet shell casings, snacks, and chocolate bars in a walnut plywood with walnut lumber edging
2026 On view
47 The Switch Which
Artist Ryan Trecartin + Lizzie Fitch
Address 3323, Samuel Shepard Drive, St. Louis, Missouri, 63103
Details 3/8" Granite, PIP Wetpour Rubber, Colored Composite Lumber & Decking, Colored Bricks, Wood, Concrete Blocks, Concrete, Concrete (Dye, Stain, Tint, Polish, & Paint), Aggregate, Metal, Hardware, Equipment Library Available for Check-Out, Plants, Planters, People, Collaborative Events, Emerging Ideas
2026 On view
48 Juanita McNeely
Artist Juanita McNeely
Address 3750, Washington Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63108
Details Exhibition
2026
49 Miss Othmar and Othmar Sumner Stowe Teachers Lounge
Artist Timmy Simonds
Address 3026, Laclede Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri, 63103
Details Decommissioned parachute
2026 On view
50 Coyote Time [City Museum]
![Coyote Time [City Museum]](https://counterpublic-media.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/27112212/City-Museum-exterior-1024x576.png)
Artist Alice Bucknell
Address 750, North 16th Street, St. Louis, Missouri, 63103
Details Video game
2026 On view
Artists
- Alan Nakagawa
- Ali Eyal
- Alice Bucknell
- Anika Todd
- Benjamin Patterson
- Brianna Leatherbury
- Carolina Caycedo
- Chris Carl
- Chris Curreri
- Cooper Jacoby
- Dail Chambers
- Emma McCormick Goodhart
- Glenn Ligon
- Guadalupe Rosales
- Inès Kivimäki
- Jamie Lee Harris
- Jean-Marc Bullet + Céline Semaan
- Juanita McNeely
- Kite
- LI Yi-Fan
- Lisa Alvarado + Joshua Abrams
- Lynne Smith
- M12 Studio
- Malcolm Peacock
- Margaret Honda
- Max Hooper Schneider
- Mee Jey
- Nicholas Galanin
- Occupy Vacancy
- People’s Art and Recreation Center
- Petrit Halilaj
- Rachel Youn
- Rebecca Belmore
- Rirkrit Tiravanija
- Ryan Trecartin + Lizzie Fitch
- Sandra Brewster
- Sebastián Llovera
- Sissel Tolaas
- Stephen Andrews
- Timmy Simonds
- Tom Burr
- Tony Cokes
- Tromarama
- Vaughn Davis Jr.
- Won Ju Lim
- Ximena Garrido-Lecca
- Yatika Starr Fields