Plenty of teens spend their time outside of class shoring up their résumés with part-time jobs or clubs, but few can claim the role of guest curator at a celebrated art museum as an extracurricular. That’s the reality for students involved in the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ Teen Museum Studies (TMS) program, a summer intensive internship that exposes students to museum careers and culminates in an exhibition highlighting the work of a regional artist.
This spring, the 2025 TMS cohort will present Janie Stamm: Mermaid’s Purse, on view in the museum’s Education Galleries from March 6–August 9. The 11 students, who hail from various schools and neighborhoods, worked together to choose Stamm from the many local artists who applied to be featured in the program.
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“I love the fact that [CAM] is free, and it’s very community-driven. I definitely wanted to be a part of that,” Stamm says. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I feel like I’ve participated in CAM in so many different ways. I’ve been one of their resident teaching artists in the past. I’ve been with them at Pride making pins. I feel like [TMS] was one of the things that I was really chomping at the bit to participate in, and I finally made it in. It’s amazing.”
The TMS students worked with Stamm over several months to curate Mermaid’s Purse and craft the exhibition, including everything from collaborating with Stamm on a piece of art to sketching the layout and working on the show’s written materials.
“I’m always pretty blown away by what the students create,” says CAM teen and adult programs manager Brandon Barr, who oversees the TMS program. “It’s always very mindful and looks at contemporary topics and issues that they’re all drawn to.”
For Mermaid’s Purse, those topics include the preservation of both queer and natural spaces in the era of climate change. Stamm, a Florida native who is now based in St. Louis, uses embroidery and natural elements such as shells and plants to encourage critical thinking about her subjects.
TMS cohort member Kamille Jefferson says that Stamm’s work fit the group’s focus on finding an artist whose work was both inspiring and had broad appeal. “At first, we really focused on inspiring themes [and] making sure that everybody was included with that theme, so everybody could be inspired by it,” she says. “We had talked about these community guidelines that we had wanted for the artist we picked to exhibit, something that would fit everybody and something that everyone could relate to, so it appealed to our general audience.”
Regardless of whether gallerygoers have been personally affected by the loss of queer and natural spaces, the hope is that they’ll see the importance of preserving them for the future. The message has already resonated deeply with the 11 students of the TMS cohort, and both Jefferson and Stamm are excited to share it with museum patrons in the months ahead.
“This has been one of the best experiences of my whole entire art life, if not my life,” Stamm says. “I feel like this cohort has blown my mind in so many different ways. Even the way I look at my own art has changed because they have seen it in a completely different light…it was a symbiotic relationship, and I’m just so honored and so proud to be a part of that legacy of the Teen Museum Studies program.”
