CULTURE Contested Spaces

Public art exhibit Counterpublic honors St. Louis’ razed Black neighborhoods and demands the return of native lands

Written by JESSICA ROGEN

Bright, geometric and colorful — 40 low, wooden platforms adorned with ribbons at their corners dot a field of grass. They are an unexpected sight next to Interstate 55.

But if those wood structures seem incongruous, that’s nothing compared to the billboard towering over them. One side reads: “WHEN YOU LISTEN THE LAND SPEAKS” and the other side says “Got Land? Give it Back! This billboard is on sacred land.”

The aforementioned land is not just an unassuming spot next to a city highway but Sugarloaf Mound, the last remaining Osage mound in St. Louis city and a spot in contention: The peak is owned by the Osage Nation while the remainder is split among private residences. The art — the platforms, WayBack by Anita and Nokosee Fields, and the billboard’s two sides, Give it Back: Stage Theory by New Red Order and The Native Guide Project: STL by Anna Tsouhlarakis — is here to highlight that.

“These are platforms that you would see throughout Osage Nation, especially during events, celebrations, weddings, but even funerals or baptism, child-naming ceremonies…” says Risa Puleo, curator of the platform piece. “This is a very vivid part of Anita’s memory. What she wanted to do was multiply these kinds of areas for gathering in relation to Sugarloaf.”

Puleo is part of a team of curators drawing attention to a too often overlooked stretch of the city with an ambitious public art exhibition called Counterpublic, which will be on display in the city through July 15. It includes 30 commissioned art and architecture installations and four permanent sculptures, including Pillars of the Valley by Damon Davis, which was installed at CITYPARK stadium earlier this year as a memorial to the historically Black but razed Mill Creek Valley neighborhood.

The installations are clustered along or slightly off Jefferson Avenue from Sugarloaf at the intersection of Ohio Avenue to St. Louis Avenue, at the Griot Museum of Black History. It’s curated by James McAnally, the executive and artistic director of Counterpublic; Puleo; Katherine Simóne Reynolds; Diya Vij; Dream the Combine; New Red Order; and Allison Glenn.

“The theme [is] about looking out to the past for a lens of repair,” says McAnally, explaining that they are spaces with histories that illustrate native displacement, Black displacement, inequality and segregation. “[By] inviting in artists to work in the spaces, we wanted to not just focus on the past but also what could be done in the present to repair what has happened here.”

The works are incredibly varied and responsive to the city’s flaws and eccentricities. Take, for example, Confluence Decree by virgil b/g taylor, which takes the form of three monthly tabloid newspapers that the artist is distributing via a newsstand outside the Met- ropolitan St. Louis Sewer District.

Created in cooperation with MSD workers, the tabloids are about the consent decree. In 2007, Missouri and the EPA sued the city for the sewer overflows that sent a mixture of sewage and rainwater throughout the city.

“It’s magical dispatches to and from the sewer,” Viji says, noting that the system was once the height of technology. “Now every time it rains, it floods, and that untreated water goes into ponds, rivers, streams. It’s a problem.”

Most of the installations have a physical presence that sticks out from unlikely corners of Jefferson, like SLOWER-THAN-LIGHTSHRINE by Black Quantum Futurism, which is located at Martin Luther King Drive in the lot next to La Rose Room Cocktail Lounge.

A testament to the Underground Railroad, the sculpture takes the form of a series of steel arches cut from reclaimed gates from demolished homes. It’s decorated with clocks, cowry shells, mirrors and more.

“People were trying to get across the rivers, across [to] Illinois,” says McAnally. “So they moved underneath the city very literally … and so this is a kind of shrine.”

Most of the pieces will just be installed for the three months Counterpublic runs. McAnally explains that because of the ambition and work required for the event, he and the team settled on having it once every three years. This year’s Counterpublic is actually the second iteration of the event. The first came in 2019.

“We kind of did it very bootstrapped, and it happened quite fast,” he says. At the time, McAnally was running the Luminary on Cherokee Street, and lots of conversations were happening about modern art and how to make it more accessible.

“Entering an art space is already a kind of hurdle for a lot of people,” he says. “I think the reputation of art, especially contemporary art, is one that’s often quite alienating and not inviting.”

He and others decided the best way to get around that would be to take the art out of art spaces — and into neighborhoods where it would come in contact with people whether they sought it out or not.

McAnally and Reynolds curated the 2019 public art installations with the help of Bree Youngblood. They reached out to the neighborhood, asking people if they’d be willing to have an artist come into their space and install a site-specific piece of public art.

That iteration ended up spanning 10 blocks and included 12 projects. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and people from around the country took notice and reached out to McAnally.

“It was interesting to see this other side of, if you do something kind of intentional and responsive to your place, suddenly the national art world started paying attention… [which] definitely informed what we built out,” he says.

It was a success by any measure but by the end, the tiny team was exhausted. “Like, we can never do it like that, again, we were so tired,” he says.

The next Counterpublic drew together a larger number of curators and the team began working on it in 2021, when artist Cheeraz Gormon put together a community report about a six-mile span of Jefferson Avenue that touches 13 different St. Louis city neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the Counterpublic group did some community listening sessions and began having conversations about what impact it sought.

“We started with the community first this time and took our time to really understand what was needed at this point,” McAnally says.

It turns out, what the community needed was more art. Thus, Counterpublic 2023 was born.

And as McAnally and the other curators think about what impact Counterpublic will have, they continue to think about the community.

“We want St. Louis to embrace it,” he says. “We’ve been building it kind of quietly and wanted to bring something real and something meaningful, and we hope people embrace it and say, ‘Yeah, this is ours.’” n