Robert Stackhouse, "St. Louie Bones." Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, described the river as “not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.”
Combined with the Missouri River, it is, he observed, the longest river in the world, as well as the most crooked, “since in one part of its journey it uses up 1,300 miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in 675.”
Remarkable as the river may be, St. Louis has done an excellent job of ignoring it, save the little stretch that flows past the Arch, unless it’s flooding—or droughty. But starting this month, Laumeier Sculpture Park zooms in for a long, close look in “The River Between Us,” an “interdisciplinary, artist-centric, ‘action research’ multinodal exhibition.”
Laumeier executive director Marilu Knode says this was one of a group of shows she conceived after arriving in St. Louis in 2009 that “fall under the rubric of ‘archaeology of place.’” Key to the concept is the physical and metaphorical connection between St. Louis and New Orleans, which is why Knode is co-curating the show with Joe Baker, executive director and chief curator of that city’s Longue Vue House & Gardens.
Both museums commissioned new work for the exhibit; in St. Louis, that includes pieces by Chicago artist Bernard Williams, who is also doing an artist’s residency at the Missouri History Museum; St. Louis artist Mel Watkin, who’s creating an installation for the indoor galleries, a sort of old-world sitting room with shrink-wrapped furniture and river navigation charts for wallpaper; Ken Lum, who designed classical busts of civil-rights plaintiffs Dred Scott and Homer Plessy; and Swedish artist Matts Leiderstam, who’s built a 360-degree platform with a viewfinder attached, an idea sparked by John Banvard’s 1848 moving panorama of the Mississippi.
Knode says Laumeier is also bringing in an environmental historian, Jenny Price, who’s originally from St. Louis but now L.A.–based. Price helped found the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, who conduct nature outings in the city.
“People think Laumeier is this neutral, natural landscape, and that’s not really true—people have been manipulating this landscape the way they have in the rest of the community,” Knode says. “So she’s looking at all these different infrastructures that we’ve laid down on the grounds, which still connect us to the Mississippi watershed…looking at electrical sources, the signage, the trailheads, all these ways in which we organize the landscape around us, how we get rid of trash.”
Knode says that this exhibit also gives Laumeier the chance to put pieces of its permanent collection in new context. Two such pieces are Robert Stackhouse’s St. Louie Bones, which is meant to evoke both boat and waterway, and Donald Lipski’s Ball? Ball! Wall? Wall!, made of 55 steel marine buoys. The indoor galleries will hang historical pieces on loan from local institutions (like a 19th-century Thomas Easterly photograph of a sinking boat in the Mississippi, which fascinated Williams when he came across it in the history museum’s holdings). And the Loans That Don’t Move program, organized by Dana Turkovic, will also give visitors more historical context, as well as provide a sort of treasure hunt through the city to see pieces that are too big or too delicate to bring on-site. That includes the pilot wheel from the steamer Erastus Wells at the St. Louis Mercantile Library; Campbell House, in its entirety; and the towboat H.T. Potts at the Museum of Transportation.
“I love the idea that the tugboat is landlocked and permanently anchored at the Museum of Transportation and visitors can climb up on it and walk around and act like they are piloting the boat,” Turkovic says. “It is the most similar to the sorts of objects we have at Laumeier—basically, it is a big outdoor sculpture.”
“The River Between Us” runs April 13 through August 25 at Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott, 314-615-5278, laumeier.org.
