The new season at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has brought with it a bevy of impressive works, from regional artists stepping into the spotlight to students considering what the future holds.
Upon entering the museum, it’s performance artist Ayana Evans’ Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do that immediately greets visitors with its video screens, gold tinsel, and red carpet sitting ready for your best strut. The first museum survey of her work continues in CAM’s performance space, fittingly bedecked in Evans’ signature neon zebra pattern.
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The videos of Evans’ performances and interactions with the public featured in Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do track 20 years of her creative process, from guerrilla performances in city streets to joyous, music-video style productions.
“I’m really touched and really appreciative of everything the museum has done, everyone I’ve worked with has done. The truth is, I had a very hard year last year,” Evans told guests at a preview of the exhibition. “My father died, my house burned down. Yeah, it was one of those, like, epically bad times…I look at all this work, and I remember how poor I was at the end of the day. I mean the negative bank account days, the bad job days. And I’ll be honest, I am really, truly touched and amazed that it just all worked out. It just all worked out.”
Beyond Evans’ space in the gallery, much of the first floor is turned over to the Great Rivers Biennial, which highlights the work of three regional artists every other year. This year’s artists are Vaughn Davis Jr., Lauren dela Roche, and Vincent Stemmler, who have each realized their visions in spectacular fashion.
Davis’ colorful, shredded canvases tread the line between painting and sculpture, playing with the height of the gallery to introduce elements of scale and movement into the work. Space expands, lines blur, and vibrant pigment draws the eye across the torn and shredded works that seem to prove that to create is to destroy.
Around a corner, Lauren dela Roche’s stylized figures fill the airy space with color. The California-born, Midwest-raised artist is self-taught, and she used the GRB opportunity to highlight her unique practice while also experimenting with several new mediums and processes.
“Lauren pushed her practice by exploring new materials, including collagelets, encaustic, a sculpture constructed from vintage dollhouses, and, incredibly, a foray into figurative cast bronze, which is a very labor intensive and highly specialist process,” CAM associate curator Misa Jeffereis says. “Throughout the bodies of work on view, Lauren carefully depicts the female form in nature and in domestic spaces, bringing up visions of intimacy, safety, and systems of caretaking.”
In his own gallery, Stemmler creates an immersive world of beauty among ruin and trickery-fueled magic. Ghostly images float among the solid concrete and rubble thanks to Victorian parlor trick technology. Organic material grows alongside (and from within) found objects and figurative sculptures. It’s a space transformed by the artist’s imagination, and it begs to be explored and understood.
“These artists have really tapped into what I consider to be the kind of soul of our city, which is our dogged determination, our resourcefulness and our resilience,” Jeffereis says. “That’s evidenced in the materials that are distressed but take on life, plants that grow despite disturbed soil, and worn materials lovingly stitched back together and reused.”
CAM’s Fall lineup offers visitors two entry points into Counterpublic’s programming. The first, Tony Cokes’ TT The River Won’t Stop (Edit) explores the legacy of Tina Turner and stretches across CAM, neighborhood billboards, and an installation at Antioch Baptist Church in The Ville. Through found text, thoughtful prompts, and a propulsive soundtrack, Cokes invites viewers to celebrate Turner while considering the systems and struggles she had to overcome to become the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll. The CAM segment of the work is part of the museum’s Street Views series and will be projected on the building’s facade nightly from dusk to dawn
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Inside the gallery, CAM hosts one part of Counterpublic’s celebration of the life and work of Feguson-born artist Juanita McNeely. The first-ever solo presentation of McNeely’s work in her own hometown is shared between CAM and the Saint Louis Art Museum, where a survey of works including paintings, draws, and ceramics are on view through February 28. CAM’s focused presentation, on view through February 7, includes McNeely’s monumental 13-panel “Triskaidekaptych” alongside preparatory drawings for the piece.
Upstairs, CAM’s Fall exhibitions cap off with a look toward the future, not only of our city but of the arts community itself. ArtReach: Near Futures is the annual student showcase of work by teens from Vashon and Sumner High Schools, led by a cohort of resident teaching artists.
“Last year, [the students] embarked upon the curricular theme of collaborative futures, in which students used art to explore themselves in relationship to the different communities to which they belong, such as their families, their neighborhoods, schools, and city,” says CAM education manager Miriam Ruiz. “So, when you visit the Education Galleries upstairs, you will see this theme cleverly explored in metaphors such as a ceramic banquet of food, a coral shoal, luminaries that light up a room, mockups of inventions that address common youth struggles, and self-published zines about St. Louis.”
The result is an impressive collection of works that not only emphasize the talent and creativity at work in these schools, but also the issues and subjects that matter to these young artists. Their work can also be seen on display at St. Louis Lambert International Airport near GateE14 in Terminal 2 in ArtReach: Zines as Activism, part of Lambert’s Art & Culture Program.
All exhibitions are on view through February 7, 2027. CAM is free and open to the public Wednesday through Sunday.
