You can’t really swing a paintbrush in St. Louis without hitting somebody making amazing visual art. We’ve got world-class museums and cutting-edge galleries, a thriving public art scene, and all manner of local geniuses toiling away in their studios here and across the country and world. What follows barely scratches the surface of the best of St. Louis’s art scene—but it’s a start.
Cbabi Bayoc
Music, fatherhood, and family life are where Cbabi Bayoc’s inspirations lie. The St. Louisan’s portraits and murals are in a visual language and style that are unmistakably his, making it easy to spot his work in locations such as schools, parks, community gardens, and Midtown’s Walls Off Washington. There are plenty more places to see his work: the artist illustrated Ibram X. Kendi’s recent book Goodnight Racism, and this summer he was commissioned by the pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion in University City to design an update to the stained glass there, more reflective of the diverse congregation.
The multimedia works of Heather Bennett use the gaze itself as a point of reference. Her photography, videos, installations, and more, often using herself as the primary model, examine portrayals of women in culture and media through a story and lens that is definitely feminist but also slightly askew, nodding to or poking fun at convention and her artistic predecessors and contemporaries. She’s shown her work all over the world and is represented locally by Bruno David Gallery. Bennett’s collaborations with writers and musicians add dimension to her stories, and her love of music comes out in her occasional DJ sets at The Royale.
Photographer Jess T. Dugan uses image and writing to explore questions of queer identity. Their portraits, using natural light and a slow process, bring depth and humanity to the people they feature—people whose stories have not always been told, or told fairly. Their 2018 book, To Survive on This Shore, with text by social worker Vanessa Fabbre, is now in its third edition. The work examines the transgender experience of aging with nuance and care. This summer, Dugan is teaching portraiture workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado.
Jen Everett’s work—photography, video, installation, and more—explores Blackness with loving intimacy, making use of family archives as well as original portraiture. Sons of Rest, a series begun in 2010, documented the queer Black community that gathered in the Tower Grove Park pavilion for which it is named—claiming space for themselves at the pavilion during the larger Pride events in the park. Everett’s installation “Somehow, we find each other” was part of CAM’s Stories of Resistance in 2021. And her work will appear in The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, an exhibition that opens at the Baltimore Museum of Art and travels to Saint Louis Art Museum in August.
Last year, St. Louis–born artist Aaron Fowler came back to his home city to create an interactive installation/residency at The Luminary, N2Existence. It was a space to showcase his own paintings and mixed-media, found-object works as well as promoting and housing local creatives and makers. Fowler’s work is heavily influenced by where and when he’s making it—be it Los Angeles or during a lockdown. His work will appear alongside international stars like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Carrie Mae Weems (and other St. Louis artists on this very list like Damon Davis, Jen Everett, Yvonne Osei and more) in this summer’s certain-to-be-a-blockbuster exhibition, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, coming to SLAM in August.
Mee Jey
Textile artist Mee Jey draws inspiration from her life as a mother and immigrant from India. Her bright, dimensional works—they might call to mind Nick Cave—use donated and recycled textiles to stand in for the viewer, involving them to a level she’d found lacking in an elitist art world. Her project Artologue: Art for All involves travels in India and the United States, encouraging everyday people to make and live with art. Art has been a second career for her, and she’s had resounding success: she served as Community Artist Fellow at Laumeier Sculpture Park, is currently Artist in Residence at Craft Alliance, and just won the prestigious Mother Art Prize.
Maxi Glamour, the Demon Queen of Polka and Baklava, is a multi-disciplinary artist. But if you’ve ever seen them move—on The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula perhaps, or at countless shows around town—you know they are themselves a living work of art. Maxi’s complete redefinition of drag must be seen to be believed, of course, but they are so much more: a queer and Black activist for social justice, public philosopher and intellectual, musician, producer, muralist, and creator of wigs and costumes that transport wearers to worlds unknown. Maxi extends beyond the confines of what we think of as visual art by embodying it themselves.
The Budweiser Clydesdales are pretty much sacrosanct around these parts, so an update of the mural on the brewery had to be good. Thankfully, Phil Jarvis nailed it—you can see his horses pulling a barrel across the building from 55. He’s also noted for distinctive signage for businesses such as Venice Café, Honeycomb, and plenty of tattoo shops in St. Louis and around the world. His fine art bristles and seethes with Picasso-esque angles and combinations. He also painted “This Poem” on behalf of the Shirley Bradley Leflore Foundation at Walls Off Washington.
The bright, large-scale paintings of Yowshien Kuo immediately invite you into his world. Once you’re there, there’s much to explore. Kuo’s paintings feature stylized images of Asian people in evocative milieu. Sometimes they are cowboys, set amidst cliché signifiers of Americana. Sometimes they’re in erotic situations, literally bound—or bound by lust and desire. His beautiful works and their commentary on otherness notched him a spot at CAM’s just-closed Great Rivers Biennial with the exhibition Suffering Politely. This winter, his solo show Eye Become the Beholder was in Turin, Italy.
Yvonne Osei’s Ghanaian heritage and upbringing inform her inquiries into history, culture, beauty, race, and more. She works in textiles, photography, installation, painting, video, and performance art. In the video “Extensions,” watch a young woman sit for magnificently long braids. “Africa Clothe Me Bare” shows Osei dressing female nude sculptures at locations worldwide. Her work is included in “States of Becoming” at The Africa Center in New York, looking at how people of African descent navigate their own roots in different settings, and last year she won a Stone & DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from her alma mater, WashU.
For his day job, David Ruggeri is a professor of health sciences at Mizzou. But he never lost his passion for art and kept making pop-art and graffiti-style work even as he earned a ton of degrees and progressed in his teaching career. He made waves this winter on South Grand Boulevard, painting a mural of banned books on the side of Dunaway Books. The bright, lovely piece may be new, but it’s so right for the setting that it seems like it’s always been there.
A true polymath, Damon Davis describes his art as “part therapy, part social commentary.” He has been a musician as half of the hip-hop duo Scriptz ‘N Screws. He’s a highly regarded filmmaker, with his documentary Whose Streets? capturing a raw and accurate look at the uprisings in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown. He also works in surrealist film, installations, sculpture, and sound. His recently unveiled installation next to the just-opened CITYPARK, “Pillars of the Valley,” memorializes and pays tribute to the once-thriving Black neighborhood of Mill Creek Valley, demolished in the late ‘50s for “urban renewal” projects.
Jon Young’s three-dimensional works—both freestanding pieces and puffy wall hangings in bright, shiny colors—reckon with his Native American heritage as a tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and his peripatetic military upbringing. The intricate works include images of insects, snakes, birds, horses, and gravity-defying sand, among other subjects. Mapping is a clear influence, as are historical markings from caves, pottery, and cartoons. Young just wrapped a duo show with Canyon Castator at Volery Gallery in Dubai, after appearing as a featured artist at the Great Rivers Biennial at CAM.
