Celebrate Missouri’s Bicentennial with half-price tickets to ‘Art Along the Rivers’ this week

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Courtesy of the St. Louis Art Museum

Norman Akers' "Dripping World"

Norman Akers, citizen Osage Nation, born 1958; Dripping World, 2020; oil on canvas; 78 x 68 inches; Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, Gift of the Jedel Family Foundation  2021.102; © Norman Akers, Courtesy Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, photo: EG Schempf 

If you missed the opening weeks of Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration, don’t fret. This week marks the first of three sets of ​​discount days in celebration of Missouri’s big birthday. From October 12-14, adult tickets to the exhibition will be half price, making now the perfect time to plan an afternoon to wander the galleries that now house more than 150 pieces covering a thousand years of regional history.

Walking into Art Along the Rivers, visitors are immediately met with a confrontation. Facing them is a wall-sized version of “The Mississippi at Elsah,” Frederick Oakes Sylvester’s pristine riverscape. But on the wall to its right, impossible to miss in its vibrant shades of yellow, green, and red, stands a bellowing elk in a far more toxic landscape. Its creator, Norman Akers, is a member of the Osage Nation, which was displaced in the 19th century by those who felt they were entitled to the land and resources evoked so beautifully in Sylvester’s oils.

It’s a fitting entry point to an exhibition that looks both backward and forward, both celebrating and reframing the history of the “confluence region,” where three mighty rivers have shaped both the land and its culture. Works are shown not chronologically but in themed galleries that put them in conversation with one another, encouraging viewers to consider the region not just in terms of statehood, borders, and timelines, but in movement of people, exchange and development of ideas, and priorities of artists. 

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Photo by Christine Jackson

The exhibition’s curators, Curator of American Art Melissa Wolfe and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of American Art Amy Torbert, worked together with scores of local experts and museums across the country to compile dozens of objects that tell the story of the region.

“It was really listening to local knowledge and then thinking about how we put that into an art historical context, and many of these things have never been put in that context,” says Wolfe of planning the exhibition. “We wanted to think about how these objects might have dialogues that talk to this region, that talk to our shared experience of this region...How do we celebrate the objects of this area and be honest about our history? Actually, I think objects can be their most powerful when they come out of conflict.”

Gallery themes include art as advocacy, arts communities, and art in production, among others, and those dialogues are sometimes explicit, sometimes more freeform. Certain items are placed directly in conversation with one another, such as textiles and products from the Philippine Reservation at the 1904 World’s Fair alongside a contemporary photography project by Filipino-American artist Stephanie Syjuco. Syjuco’s work features images of people who were brought to the fair from the Philippines to perform as living exhibits, their faces covered by the artist’s hand. 

“It really disrupts what we still kind of have as an anthropological gaze,” Torbert says. “We’re expecting these photographs to teach us something about the people pictured, but those people didn’t really give their permission to have their photographs taken, or if they did...once that picture was made, they completely lost control of how it would be used.” 

In short, the subjects agreed to be photographed, not studied. Syjuco leaves the context, but removes the subject, forcing us to think about how, when, and by whom they were taken. When placed alongside textiles and products originally studied as anthropological artifacts, now instead viewed as art objects, both displays gain context that makes them even more engaging. 

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Filipino artist, Philippines; Man's Backpack, before 1904; rattan and peel; 20 5/8 x 12 x 9 5/8 inches; Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, Gift of the Philadelphia Commercial Museum (also known as the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum), 2003 2021.181

Other times the conversations are more broad. A series of portraits, some created a full two centuries apart, prompt thoughts about legacy and memory. An intricate zither and a series of corn cob pipes among more traditional decorative arts seem to ask if you approve of their inclusion from under the cone of zither music softly strumming overhead. Ducking into a side room of architectural plans, including a grand design for the museum itself that never came to pass, is a reminder of the many minds and hands that built our environment around us. At intervals, the provided audio tour gives visitors access to both art historians and community members, who offer their own perspectives. Featured speakers include Park Central Development Executive Director Abdul-Kaba Abdullah, former mayor of Times Beach Marilyn Leistner, and Delbert and Dolores Schmidt of Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg, among others.

Set around that theme of confluence, how things are formed and changed by their joining together, the exhibition is an exciting contemplation, though not necessarily of a state turning 200. Instead, it leaves visitors with an impression of people and the ways they have shaped one another, and the ways they continue to define and be defined by where they ended up.

Art Along the Rivers runs now through January 9, 2022. Special Bicentennial Celebration ticket prices will also be available from November 9-11 and December 14-16. 

There’s so much to see at Art Along the Rivers, but here are some highlights from the far-reaching exhibition: