Culture

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[VISUAL ART]

St. Louis Art Rules

Contemporary Art Museum’s Great Rivers Biennial celebrates the great art the region has to o er

Written by KASEY NOSS

An iridescent desert landscape. A lush, green garden. A playground in Cleveland, Ohio. The 2022 Great Rivers Biennial exhibition takes viewers to all these places — and more.

The Contemporary Art Museum (3750 Washington Avenue, 314-535-4660) celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Great Rivers Biennial exhibition in September. Part of the museum’s fall/ winter exhibition, the biennial is an every-other-year collaboration between the museum and the Gateway Foundation designed to foster artistic talent in the greater St. Louis metro area.

More than 105 applicants vied for a spot in this year’s exhibition. The three winners, Yowshien Kuo, Jon Young and Yvonne Osei, each received $20,000 in unrestricted prize money and a part in a major exhibition in the main galleries.

The Great Rivers Biennial is an open-call program, meaning the only restrictions on who can apply is that the artist be local and emerging or mid-career.

“It really is about allowing opportunity and accessibility,” says Wassan Al-Khudhairi, chief curator at CAM. “It’s such a unique opportunity because it’s something that many cities don’t have to offer artists.”

After the initial round of online applications, the jurors conduct a second round of deliberation via studio visits, so that even artists who don’t win have an opportunity to showcase their work. This year’s judges were Carmen Hermo, associate curator for the Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; Jen Liu, a New York-based visual artist; and Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in os Angeles, and instructor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Although this year’s exhibit didn’t have a theme, all three of the artists gravitated toward questions of national and personal identity. Kuo, for example, explores what it means to be Asian and Asian American in his exhibition Sufferingly Politely.

“I feel like the sentiment in Asia is that the population is so high that the individual no longer becomes important,” Kuo says. “And then, in the United States, that’s transferred to all the kinds of stereotypes that exist around Asian Americans: quiet, reserved, not forefront in public; they won’t make a scene, which means that often we’re socially taken advantage of, even unconsciously. There’s this sort of quiet suffering that occurs.”

Kuo’s show, which features vibrant vignettes of debauchery backlit by neon lights and streaked with glitter, seeks to “tantalize” viewers, encouraging them to engage with and display the “quiet and invisible” aspects of themselves. To view the exhibition, patrons must remove their shoes and step onto a plush, white carpet, which Kuo says further invites vulnerability. The figures that you’re going to encounter in the exhibition are essentially putting themselves in a very vulnerable state as they are navigating their way through reality and the dreams that they carry,” Kuo says. “The components of the installation are there to encourage you to also place yourselves in a state of dreaming, in a state of vulnerability.”

Osei’s multimedia exhibition Brainchild explores Black youth and motherhood in the United States. Osei drew heavily from her experiences during her own pregnancy, of which she learned just one week prior to receiving the award.

“I was in that state of mind just thinking of what it means to have generational inheritance, what it means to build a legacy, what it means to be a caretaker,” Osei says. “And I couldn’t stop thinking about African and African American mothers that have birthed their promise and didn’t see them fully actualized.”

To create the work, Osei embarked on a series of pilgrimages across the United States, visiting areas significant to the ci il rights movement — such as Selma, Alabama — and areas of more recent significance, too such as the recreational center in Cleveland, Ohio, where a white police o cer fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

“This work really looks at promise and childhood innocence in the Black community and how that’s not regarded,” Osei says. “‘I’m not only thinking of pregnancy in the literal sense of birth and coming into the world, but I’m also thinking of how we’re all pregnant with ideas, with ambitions, and not seeing them come to fruition — how much of a loss that is.”

The third exhibition, Young’s The Other Side of Quicksand, reimagines the American frontier as something at once familiar and foreign. He spotlights recognizable symbols of Americana — such as cacti and picnic tables — but turns them mystifying with iridescent hues and unconventional materials, including desert sands and upholstery.

“I thought about the show as a spectacle, site specific wor , Young says. “I pulled sands from either coast to this place that is considered ‘Gateway to the West.’”

Though visually alluring, the exhibition holds a deeper and darker meaning for Young, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“There is mapping that’s happening through the work, this mapping of collapsing symbols of the mythological West,” Young says. “It relates to my native heritage and my journey. It’s like trying to make a map to get back to a home that hasn’t existed for a long time.”

The Contemporary Art Museum urges art connoisseurs and amateurs alike to check out the Great Rivers Biennial, which will remain on display until Sunday, February 12, 2023.

“They have pushed themselves to scale up and create immersive experiences for people,” AlKhudhairi says. “The shows are relevant; they’re engaging with our current social and political climate. I think there’s something for everyone in these exhibitions.” n

Yvonne Osei’s “Africa Clothe Me Bare.” | COURTESY PHOTO

“ I couldn’t stop thinking about

African and

African American mothers that have birthed their promise and didn’t see them fully actualized.”

Tell All

In her new memoir, Cori Bush shares her story in her own words for the first time

Written by MONICA OBRADOVIC

Cori Bush has always had a story to tell, and she’s never shied away from telling it. From living unhoused as a single mother, to her two abortions and fighting on the frontlines of Ferguson, Bush has recounted her life story to countless crowds and reporters. ow, for the first time, ush is telling her story in her own words. This week, her memoir, Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America, hits the stands. It’s not the “typical political memoir,” Bush says.

“People told me to use this book to talk about my policies and relate it to my personal story,” Bush tells the RFT. “But I wanted this boo to be a memoir why fight the way that fight.

In the book’s 251 pages, Bush recounts her life, from early childhood in Northwoods, Missouri, to her election to Congress.

In a way, Bush has been writing her memoir for 20 years. Even at a young age she was a talented writer, winning a writing contest in high school. At 16, an elder at her family’s church encouraged her to write a book. She started keeping journals, recording incredibly personal details about her life. But after various moves, Bush has no idea where the journals are.

If they’re still out there, those journals “tell all.”

“One of the books even has a body count on the front of the inside cover,” Bush says. “I realized later, looking at those folks that are on there, how many were rapes versus consensual sex?”

Bush wrote about multiple sexual assaults and rapes she survived in crushing detail in her memoir. n the first pages of her book alone, Bush recalls a time she was raped by a “faith leader,” just four weeks after her unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 2016. The faith leader had a house for rent, and Bush took him up on a tour. She had felt her rise in public attention made her first oor apartment feel unsafe for her and her two kids, Zion and Angel.

To Bush’s surprise, the faith leader grabbed her and forced himself onto her in one of the house’s bedrooms.

This is just one of many anecdotes of sexual violence Bush shares in Forerunner. Despite the di culty of writing and editing such vulnerable memories, Bush was determined to do so.

“I just really wanted to go all the way in so those who don’t understand — those that push us away, those that tell us we’re lying, those that say it was our fault — take it in and see what it can be like,” Bush says.

Bush spends much of her book putting up a mirror to St.

Louis city and county. As a single mother with no safety net, she faced eviction after eviction. At one point, Bush lived in a 1996

Ford Explorer with her ex-husband while her two kids were still on formula. She climbed through white-dominated and racist environments — including one of her own high schools, the now-closed Blessed Trinity

Catholic School in Spanish Lake.

Bullying by students and teachers caused Bush to leave school after only one semester there.

Yet we all know Bush makes it through. The congresswoman hopes Forerunner will serve as a ray of light for women who’ve lived through similar tribulations.

“I hope that people see that even as somebody who has the past that I had, you can still reach way beyond the stars,” Bush says. n

e book launch for Cori Bush’s memoir takes place on ursday, October 6.| PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

Left Bank Books will host a book launch with Bush at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 6, at the Touhill Performing Arts Center. Find ticket information on Left Bank Books’ website.

[GOOD SPORT]

St. Louis Proud

Ed Wheatley’s new book St. Louis Sports Memories is a comprehensive history of hyper-local sports

Written by BENJAMIN SIMON

People kept asking Ed Wheatley when he would write a book on the history of bowling. St. Louis’ bowling history was magical — Wheatley couldn’t deny that. In 1958, a St. Louis squad, considered the “dream team,” set the record for the highest score — a record that would last for over 35 years.

“St. Louis was the bowling capital of the world,” he says.

But Wheatley didn’t know if he could sell a whole book about bowling. He started thinking. What about tennis and Arthur Ashe’s journey through St. Louis? What about horse racing at Fairmount Park in Illinois? What about the kids from the Hill, who participated in the 1950 World Cup game?

There was just so much that people didn’t know about sports in St. Louis. Then, he realized he had a book.

“It just expanded to: Why not put it all into one book?” he says.

That’s how Wheatley’s newest book, St. Louis Sports Memories, which hit the shelves this past weekend, came together.

Everyone in St. Louis knows about the Cardinals and the Rams, Wheatley says. But this book highlights the comprehensive, multifaceted and hyper-local history of St. Louis sports history — from bowling to the National Invitation Tournament champion Saint Louis University basketball team to the historic Washington University volleyball program to Sonny Liston to Jackie Joyner-Kersee to chess.

“It’s the diversity of the sports,” he says. “We’re not a one-sports town or a two-sport town. We have a history, centuries old.”

Over the years, Wheatley has written a number of books about St. Louis sports history, exploring wrestling at the Chase and the St. Louis Browns baseball team. But for this book, he realized he wanted to appeal to everyone, to allow St. Louisans to go back in time and reminisce.

“Go back and remember the good times,” he says. “Build upon it, recognize what you have.”

Throughout this month, Wheatley will give book tours in the St. Louis area, making stops at the St. Louis Sports Collectors Show, Serendipity Homemade Ice Cream, Left Bank Books and Grant’s View Public Library. He’s also working on a new book about the Negro Leagues in St. Louis.

Normally, he takes two or three years to write a book, Wheatley says. But his publisher asked him to complete this one by the end of 2022, and he finished it in eight months.

“I put this one into supersonic speed,” he says.

He’d wake up at 3 a.m., and if he had an idea, he’d start researching and writing. Sometimes he wouldn’t stop until the sun went down.

“It was the excitement of finding these nuggets — that each time you go into a sport, there were these nuggets that we don’t know about or herald here,” he says.

Wheatley hopes that comes through in the book.

“This book is all about St. Louis proud,” he says. “Every chapter. Every single chapter is St. Louis proud.” n

Ed Wheatley holds a copy of his latest book, St. Louis Sports Memories. | COURTESY PHOTO

Catch Ed Wheatley from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, October 8, at Serendipity Homemade Ice Cream (4400 Manchester Avenue). The signing is free to attend.