There’s “Man on Horse” on a leafy street in Clayton. There’s “Fish on a Bicycle” at Lewis Park in University City and “Looking Up” in Forest Park. There’s “Treemonisha” on a highway on-ramp in Lafayette Square and “Jelly Babies” at the entrance to the children’s room at the Central Library downtown.
For 40 years, Gateway Foundation has been making St. Louis a more visually interesting place by installing works of art around town. It’s work that goes far beyond Citygarden, the sculpture park the foundation opened downtown in 2009 and where it continues to add new installations. The foundation installed the seven bronze statues by Carl Milles at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It installed “Thinker on Rock” at WashU and “China, China” at the airport. If you’ve seen a piece of public art around town that has made you smile or even just look more closely, chances are it came from Gateway Foundation. Its legacy includes 70 sculptures around St. Louis and $136 million in investment.
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It’s done all that, and more, without drawing much attention to itself. When journalists would ask about Gateway Foundation, they’d often be met with polite deflection. It’s been reported that the late Teresa and Aaron Fischer founded the organization, and that family members are still involved, but few details have been made public beyond that.
That’s now changing—but just a bit. To celebrate the foundation’s 40th anniversary, executive director Heather Sweeney shared a bit about its vision with SLM, and it plans in the days and weeks to come to share about its work on social media. But it continues to prefer that its work speak for itself. In an inversion of the classic construction from The Wizard of Oz, it doesn’t want you to think of the men and women behind the curtain. It wants you to survey the wonders of Oz.
And what wonders! That “Man on Horse” is the work of acclaimed sculptor Fernando Botero. Works at Citygarden include “Untitled (Ringed Figure)” by Keith Haring and “Eros” by Igor Mitorag. And those are just a few examples.
Says Sweeney, “We’ve worked with the city and the county, we’ve worked with neighborhood associations and with nonprofit or other organizations, to create these spaces that house these acclaimed works in your day to day, so that you can just stumble upon them. And it’s done with very little to probably absolutely no fanfare so you can joyously find these things just in your community spaces.”
The foundation’s work is not entirely sculpture. Its Gyo Obata Fellowship was
established in honor of groundbreaking architect Gyo Obata, who served two decades on its board. It places undergraduate students in paid positions within St. Louis arts institutions, creating a valuable pipeline for arts administrators. The foundation also sponsors The Great Rivers Biennial in partnership with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, which each year identifies three emerging or mid-career artists in the region, honoring them each with $25,000 and placement at CAM. Since 2001, it has also worked to illuminate the Gateway Arch—one reason it touts its work as “bringing art, design, and light into public spaces across the region.”
Gateway Foundation was placing sculptures around town long before it developed a space of its own (its first installation was the sculptures at the Missouri Botanical Garden, in 1988). It continues that work today, with two new placements around town in the past year, including installations at St Louis Community College-Wildwood and in front of Craft Alliance. It has plans to add sculptures to the Brickline Greenway and the new Tower Grove Connector in the coming months. (You can see the complete map of its current works online.) Says Sweeney, “What we invest in has always been good design. For us, the impetus has been these spaces that could house work of this caliber, and artists of this acclaim, and intentionally pairing that place with that particular work.”
Citygarden remains the most concentrated place to see its work in full blossom. It houses 29 of the 70 sculptures installed by the foundation, in a lovely park-like setting that also includes a splash pad and a wading pool beloved by downtown’s youngest visitors.
“Citygarden was this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we wanted to harness and be able to design right, to create that platform of that good design,” Sweeney says. “And how do you create a public space that is welcoming, that’s inviting, that’s accessible, that highlights this international art that also brings in Missouri botanicals and has the design nod to the Missouri landscape in this urban environment? It was a dream, and it was this opportunity to lean into what we could preserve in the Gateway Mall, and what we could present. To say, ‘We can do this, and we’ll start.’”
Sweeney says the foundation feels gratified by the investment in the area that has since followed, from the $380 million CityArchRiver project better connecting the Arch grounds to downtown to the current effort to demolish and redevelop the long vacant Millennium Hotel site.
“I see the work that’s being done through downtown and through the Gateway Mall specifically,” she says. “We made this investment and we are going to continue our stewardship of this space and we hope that there are partners that are here that are looking to do similar things.”
Gateway Foundation will share its story on social media throughout the next year. You can follow along via its Instagram account or Citygarden’s.
“Forty years is a pretty monumental milestone,” Sweeney says. “We have worked with such a variety of wonderful partners over these last four decades that, for us, this is a big opportunity to shine the light on what they have accomplished, what has built up the region, what has contributed to the fabric of St. Louis life.”
