Partner Exhibitions
We’re thrilled to partner with The Luminary, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Monaco, and the Saint Louis Art Museum for Counterpublic 2023. Keep reading to learn about installations, artists, and sites involved in these partnerships.
Black Quantum Futurism "Quantum Time Capsule" detail of installation, Adjustable Monuments group exhibition, Philara Collection, Düsseldorf, Photo: Kai Werner Schmidt (2022)
Black Quantum Futurism at The Luminary
Commissioned by Counterpublic, collaborative duo Black Quantum Futurism will present Community Futures: Space-Time Liberation Lab (CF:STL Lab) at The Luminary.
CF:STL Lab, an Afrofuturist housing and land justice lab, is curated by Counterpublic’s Executive Director James McAnally and is supported by The Luminary’s Artistic Director Kalaija Mallery. The exhibition is on view for the three months of Counterpublic 2023, from April 14-July 15.
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is an interdisciplinary creative practice between Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips that weaves quantum physics and Afrodiasporic concepts of time, space, ritual, text, and sound. Their CF:STL Lab explores tools and mechanisms for how residents and community members of St. Louis can reclaim home, land, space, time, and memory in their neighborhoods, and the pathways for repair and justice that are both forward-reaching and backward-reaching simultaneously—correcting the past and reshaping futures where justice and equity are fundamental and inalienable aspects of our shared reality.
The Luminary is an expansive platform for art, thought and action, located on Cherokee Street. Since its inception The Luminary has been a home for exceptional art that engages the pressing issues of the present. Through an active roster of exhibitions, residencies, performances, publications and gatherings, they act as a point of convergence for diverse publics. The Luminary cultivates thoughtful platforms for exchange, supports forward-moving art and ideas, and attempts to model a more equitable and interconnected art world as an institution of our time.
Rendering of Torkwase Dyson, "Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin)," for Counterpublic 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery.
Torkwase Dyson at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Counterpublic has commissioned a piece from Torkwase Dyson, Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), an outdoor, sonic, site-specific installation. This work will be on view during the 3-month exhibition in St. Louis Place Park at Benton Street and Rauschenbach Avenue, near the Griot Museum of Black History. Alongside the Counterpublic-commissioned installation, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is exhibiting Dyson’s work in the exhibition “Torkwase Dyson: Bird and Lava” in their James M. Kemper and video galleries.
The Mildred Lane Kemper's exhibition will present an expansive view of Torkwase Dyson's Bird and Lava series. The display spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation. Rounding out the exhibition will be renderings and maquettes relating to Dyson’s sonic architectural installation Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), which will debut in St. Louis Place Park for Counterpublic 2023. Dyson’s semi-permeable wood-and-steel structure, like her Bird and Lava series overall, invites us to consider the sociopolitical potential of shape, surface, and structure while envisioning new, livable worlds.
Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. In addition to participating in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Dyson has had solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago; Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia; and Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont.
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, was established in 1881 with the founding of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts at Washington University. The museum is committed to preserving and developing its art collection and continuing its legacy of collecting significant art of the time; providing excellence in art historical scholarship, education and exhibition; inspiring social and intellectual inquiry into the connections between art and contemporary life; and engaging audiences on campus, in the local community, across the nation and worldwide. The museum is free and open to all.
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, "State Names," 2000, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Elizabeth Ann Dugan and museum purchase, 2004.28. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Monaco
Counterpublic 2023 has commissioned two large-scale new works by Quick-to-See Smith curated by Risa Puleo to be on view at Monaco, an artist owned cooperative gallery located at 2701 Cherokee Street.
The works will be on view in the South St. Louis neighborhood being engaged by Counterpublic 2023 co-curator Puleo, which is colloquially referred to as the "State Streets" because North-South streets are named for U.S. States. In this same area, streets that run East-West are named for Native nations and prominent Native leaders, though this fact is not as often recognized, nor is the narrative of their naming or their intersections commonly known or understood within the city.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has been creating complex abstract paintings and prints since the 1970s grounded in themes of personal and political identity. Smith has received the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, and more. She’s been an Art Table Artist Honoree, was elected to the National Academy of Art in New York, received the Living Artist of Distinction Award at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and has received four honorary doctorates. Smith’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Ecuador, the Museum of Mankind in Austria, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Established in 2017, Monaco is an artist-owned cooperative that operates as an alternative to the traditional gallery model. Referencing one of the wealthiest states in the world—notorious as a “freeport” for art and other luxury items—the name suggests a sovereign micro-state, emphasizing the autonomy of the project, and hints at ideas of commerciality in the contemporary art world. Monaco provides opportunities for critical inquiry and commercial potential, and supports its members by forging new connections and fostering community. Members include both emerging and mid-career artists, and collaborative entities as well as individuals. Its exhibits range from solo shows to curated group exhibitions. Monaco is an independent project directed by its members and was initiated by The Luminary as a part of its mission to support new artist-centric spaces.
New Red Order at the Saint Louis Art Museum
New Red Order is a public secret society of rotating membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances. Their projects question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. New Red Order’s work accelerates the disruption of settler colonialism through calls for the restoration of dispossessed land to Indigenous people. Through their ongoing project, Give it Back, New Red Order investigates, presents, and promotes actualized gestures of land being "voluntarily" returned.
For Give it Back: Stage Theory, New Red Order approached the archives of St. Louis institutions, investigating the city’s role in histories of loss and Native dispossession along multiple timescales. These scales range from ancient Cahokia to modern genocide—with St. Louis operating as the premier site of deployment for the Indian Wars—to the razing of Mississippian mounds, which helped clear space for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which put Indigenous peoples were on display in an apparent attempt to naturalize racial inequalities and promote stage theories of racial progress. New Red Order traces the continuance of present-day occupation of contested Indigenous lands. Reviewing these cases as a collection agency, which pursues debts due, they consider what might be positioned as cures for St. Louis’ historical and ongoing engagement with Indigenous peoples. In Give it Back: Stage Theory, New Red Order asks: What can be given back? What if they never left? What happens when they return?
New Red Order, a public secret society of rotating membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and re-channel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. Orienting their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, NRO explores the contradictions and missteps that embody, in their own words, “the desire for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas.” NRO’s work has been exhibited at Audain Gallery at MOCAD, the Toronto Biennial of Art, EFA Project Space, Artists Space in New York, Walker Art Center, the 57th New York Film Festival, the Whitney Museum, and more.
The Saint Louis Art Museum, founded in 1879, collects, presents, interprets, and conserves works of art of the highest quality across time and cultures; educates, inspires discovery, and elevates the human spirit; preserves a legacy of artistic achievement for the people of St. Louis and the world; and engages, includes, and represents the full diversity of the St. Louis community supporting it. What began as a collection of assorted plaster casts, electrotype reproductions, and other examples of good design in various media rapidly gave way to a great and varied collection of original works of art spanning five millennia and six continents. Today the quality and breadth of the Museum’s collection secure for it a place among the very best institutions of its kind.
