Artists and art lovers in St. Louis have several special opportunities to seize in the days and months ahead. Major shows of African and African-American art are closing this month, and a call for proposals for a new sculpture that honors slaves suing for their freedom has been issued with a November 9 deadline.
Most immediately, “Solomon Thurman: An Artistic Practice” closes September 19 in the Bellwether Gallery of St. Louis Artists at The Sheldon Art Galleries, 3648 Washington Blvd.
This exhibition presents an overview of the rich career of St. Louis artist Solomon Thurman encompassing over 40 years of work in painting, drawing and sculpture. It includes works from his “Personal Migration” series, which was created to celebrate the life of his grandmothers, Lillie and Johnnie Mae, who were second-generation former slaves from the Mississippi Delta, as well as works from his “Songs of the Field” and recent “Highway Landscapes” series.
Thurman is perhaps best known for his “Black Americans in Flight” mural at Lambert Airport (co-designed with Spencer Taylor). He is co-owner of 10th Street Gallery in downtown St. Louis, and a community outreach instructor at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
And then “Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa” – the first African art exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum in more than 15 years – closes on Sunday, September 27. It features 170 works borrowed from nearly 60 public and private collections in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, originally curated by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The “Senufo” label was applied to visual art from Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Burkina Faso, a trio of West African countries colonized by the French in the late 1880s. The exhibit shows audiences that modern artistic icons like Pablo Picasso eagerly embraced the unique inventiveness in West African art at a time when Africans were often seen as less than human.
Two of the museum’s excellent public programs devoted to “Senufo” remain on the calendar as well. On September 6 at 2 p.m. dance troupe Afriky Lolo will perform in the museum’s Farrell Auditorium. And on September 17 at 6:30 p.m. Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, a cultural advisor to the exhibition, will deliver the lecture “Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa.”
Finally, last week the Freedom Suits Memorial Steering Committee issued a Request for Proposals from visual artists to create a memorial sculpture that honors approximately 400 slaves who filed suits in Missouri Courts to demand their freedom, assisted by lawyers working without pay. The sculpture will stand at the east plaza of the Civil Courts Building downtown.
The sculpture will be aligned with the Gateway Mall and the Old Courthouse, where most of these suits were tried – including that of Dred Scott and Harriet Scott. The Scotts initially won their freedom in the St. Louis court but lost it on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, a decision that helped propel the nation into the Civil War.
The project is open to all sculpture artists throughout the United States. The project budget is $200,000 (all inclusive). Fundraising will be conducted through the St. Louis Bar Foundation.
Copies of the RFP are available from Thom Gross, public information officer for the 22nd Judicial Circuit of Missouri. Requests may be emailed to tgross@courts.mo.gov. The RFP also may be downloaded from the website for the court, www.stlcitycircuitcourt.com/News_Blog. Proposals are due by November 9.
