“Urban Planning: Art and the City 1967–2017,” which opened Friday, May 5 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, is a strikingly accessible and varied exhibition of contemporary art, with many black voices and visions represented among the 24 major international artists with work in the show, curated by Kelly Shindler.
Arguably the two most ambitious and adventurous pieces in a wildly ambitious and adventurous exhibition – “St. Louis Blues” by Abigail DeVille and “The Republic” by David Hartt – are by black artists who use the Contemporary’s roomy galleries in novel and dramatic ways.
“St. Louis Blues” is a site-specific installation created from materials scavenged in St. Louis while the artist was in residence here. At its center is a crib that looks like a cage. It’s enclosed in a skeletal dome-shaped wooden structure based on the architecture of the Old Courthouse, where slaves were once sold on the steps and law suits arguing for slaves’ freedom were decided in the court rooms. The dome is encircled by a picket fence draped with barbed wire and hung with dolls and other found objects. Train tracks exit the dome to form a loop on the main floor space of the gallery; the train cars bear the burden of bones. The space is lit by the flickering of a dense, strobing video by Kent Barrett, illustrated with a spectral soundtrack by the HawtPlates.
To be sure, that makes for a grim picture of St. Louis, but the installation is itself welcoming and (despite its painful imagery) strangely beautiful. The artist lined one wall along the the entrance to the gallery with spindly brush; in a crowded media preview, guests entering the space could hardly avoid grazing the twigs and interacting physically with the installation. To cross the room, you have to step over and through the railroad tracks. A charred door to the domed structure is open, and there is enough space, barely, between barbed picket fence and courthouse skeleton to walk around inside. The installation also includes theater seats, where one is welcomed to sit on part of the art to look at the rest of it.
The cumulative effect is that you have encountered someone else’s abandoned dream where you are welcome to enter, at your own risk and potential joy, and that works well as a portrait of St. Louis in 2017.
“The Republic” by the black Canadian artist David Hartt approaches Detroit, Michigan and Athens, Greece, rather than St. Louis, but offers a similarly original yet definitive portrait of a place – or, rather, of two places. Hartt achieves a multi-media convergence of two cities on separate continents more than 5,000 miles apart. Both cities share the quality of having seen more prosperous and impactful days (which St. Louis also knows something about). According to the Contemporary’s informative and eloquent exhibit notes, the two cities also are linked by Constantinos Doxiadis, a Greek architect who designed unrealized master plans for both cities in the 1950s and ‘60s, so “The Republic” also is like the resumption of someone else’s unfinished dream.
Like DeVille, Hartt mixes media and materials. In his case, the video is central to the experience of the piece. To Sam Prekop’s musical score, Hartt chops and screws the two cities, American and Greek, creating an uncanny urban blend. Cast bronze classical Greek-themed sculptures and turned poplar stools create the feeling of a living room where the video is experienced as if on someone’s home television. A large photograph of a cat stares down from one of the Contemporary’s high windows. Eddie Silva of the Contemporary, who penned the exhibit texts with guest curator Kelly Shindler, described this animal as a “surveillance cat,” but its effect in the gallery space is more homey than sinister. This is an art exhibit that comes with a cat.
Other black artists with work in “Urban Planning” include Edgar Arcenaux (a visionary painting of a speakeasy in the sky), Mark Bradford (manipulated urban merchant posters: “FATHERS DO YOU WANT CHILD CUSTODY?”), Kevin Jerome Everson, Theaster Gates (a coiled fire hose titled “In the Event of a Race Riot”), Glenn Ligon, Gary Simmons and Maya Stovall, the “radical ballerina.”
A local African-American artist, Addoley Dzege, has three meditations on blackness in “Color Key,” the front-room show that also opened at the Contemporary on May 5. “Color Key,” sponsored by Critical Mass for the Visual Artists, features the three winners of Critical Mass’ juried 2016 Creative Stimulus Award. The other artists displayed in the show are Ellie Balk, who made a site-specific mural that explores the number pi, and Amy Reidel, who has a colorful composition on the floor made from glitter and small sculptures drawn from materials such as “studio trash” and “fake hair.”
“Urban Planning” is on view through August 13 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3570 Washington Blvd., and has much public programming connected to the exhibition. For more information, visit http://camstl.org/.
