Currents 124: Crystal Z Campbell

The fall “Currents” exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum features new works by multidisciplinary artist Crystal Z Campbell. The free exhibition is on view through March 9, 2025.

Campbell is a visual artist as well as an experimental filmmaker and writer who uses archival interventions and abstraction to shed new light on overlooked historical narratives around the “underloved.” Influenced by their Black and Filipinx familial history, Campbell’s works echo strategies of envelopment and embeddedness used by the U.S. to colonize the Philippines. The artworks fuse overlooked material histories, archival imagery, and abstraction in a subtle evocation of the Philippine landscape and colonial extraction.

Campbell’s expansive practice in the exhibition includes video, collage, handmade paper works, and glass sculptures. Campbell’s colorful and colorless blown-glass apothecary vessels—made at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wash.—are landmarked throughout the exhibition, presenting these objects as alchemical symbols for healing from colonial legacies. These legacies relate specifically to St. Louis, since more than 1,200 Filipinos were brought to the city to feature as living displays in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with a number of them dying from disease.

Digital collages fuse archival photography with painterly abstraction including Campbell’s tribute to African American soldier David Fagen, who deserted from the American army during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) to fight with the Philippine Revolutionary Army, thus becoming a symbol of resistance to colonialism. Other works highlight imagery of the Philippine abaca industry, which was a principal motivation for U.S. colonialism and related land extraction. Material histories are both unraveled and poetically embedded in several handmade paper works—which were created during Campbell’s time as a fellow at the Dieu Donné papermaking studio in Brooklyn and are made of manila envelopes and manila rope, alluding to the centrality of the Philippine abaca industry to the U.S. colonial project. A video installation, “Makahiya,” also explores Philippine flora and specifically this sacred, touch-sensitive plant—mimosa pudica—that translates to “shame”, and hints at the regimented forgetting of colonial histories and evocatively traces the ways in which nature, U.S. colonization of the Philippines, and abstraction are intertwined.

Campbell is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, which included this exhibition and a residency at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Campbell was also a 2021 Guggenheim fellow.

The exhibition is curated by Simon Kelly, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. This presentation is generously supported in part by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund

About the “Currents” series
Founded in 1978, the “Currents” series serves as a laboratory for emerging and mid-career artists to create and exhibit new work. Featured artists have included Matthew Buckingham, Dale Chihuly, Leonardo Drew, Brian Eno, Ellen Gallagher, Frank Gehry, Donald Judd, Julie Mehretu, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman.