Summer 2016 exhibitions

Mark Bradford: Receive Calls on Your Cell Phone from Jail
May 6–August 14, 2016

Lyndon Barrois Jr., Nanette Boileau, Tate Foley: Great Rivers Biennial
May 6–August 14, 2016

Lili Reynaud-Dewar: I Sing the Body Electric
May 6–August 14, 2016

Nomad Studio: Green Air
May 21–August 14, 2016 

This summer CAM presents the 2016 Great Rivers Biennial, featuring new work by St. Louis artists Lyndon Barrois Jr., Nanette Boileau, and Tate Foley; the museum debut of Mark Bradford’s installation Receive Calls on Your Cell Phone From Jail; new video work by Lili Reynaud-Dewar; and an immersive hanging garden by Nomad Studio.

The Great Rivers Biennial Arts Award Program, a collaborative initiative between CAM and Gateway Foundation, identifies talented emerging and mid-career artists working in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, providing them with a 20,000 USD honorarium and a major exhibition at CAM. Three distinguished jurors—Anne Ellegood, Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum; Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Paul Pfeiffer, sculptor, photographer, and video artist—selected the 2016 winners from more than 80 submissions. Through a multi-disciplinary practice including installation, painting, and sculpture, Lyndon Barrois Jr. examines questions of aesthetic value, race, representation, and the creation of meaning through imagery in popular culture. Nanette Boileau bases her practice on the vast territory of the Louisiana Purchase, creating nuanced portraits of the contemporary American West through writing, painting, and video. Tate Foley’s work revolves around printing and bookmaking, often examining connections between language and social issues. Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs / Chief Curator.

CAM presents the museum debut of Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford’s installation Receive Calls on Your Cellphone From Jail, a grid of 38 paintings composed of posters that discuss the challenges of receiving collect calls from prison on a cell phone. Through a signature collage process, Bradford creates his works by affixing found materials—such as billboard posters—to canvas, often searching his South Los Angeles neighborhood for signage and rooting his work in the realities of urban life. In his mixed-media compositions, paper replaces paint and is often torn, glued, sanded, and saturated with water to create a malleable pulp: materials that cling to the city are repurposed and given a renewed agency. In Receive Calls on Your Cellphone From Jail, Bradford builds up and then tears down the work’s surfaces, asking viewers to consider how incarcerated people might feel consumed, abandoned, and discarded by the criminal justice system. Curated by Jeffrey Uslip, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs / Chief Curator.

French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s performances and installations address notions of femininity and how the body moves in space. Titled after a Walt Whitman poem, I Sing the Body Electric features two videos of the artist dancing in the empty galleries of the Arsenale and Central Pavilion following the close of the 56th Venice Biennial in 2015, where her work was featured. We watch Reynaud-Dewar galloping and sashaying alone through vast spaces, her gestures recalling modern and folk dance as well as yoga poses. Painted red, her nude figure hovers between object and subject as Reynaud-Dewar literally asserts herself within the larger narrative of the history of art. Curated by Kelly Shindler, Associate Curator.

Designed by New York-based Nomad Studio, Green Air is the second major, transformational installation in CAM’s courtyard. Consisting of thousands of slices of wood suspended from the courtyard’s canopy with air plants attached to each, the undulating sculpture hangs above the heads of visitors, swaying in the breeze and filling the 45-by-50-foot space. Headed by William E. Roberts and Laura Santín, landscape architecture firm Nomad Studio is known for combining contemporary art and design with natural elements. Green Air is the second work in a two-year commission made possible by an Innovation Fund grant by the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and follows Nomad’s previous installation, Green Varnish. The new work re-uses the wood that formed the armature of the original sculpture and re-envisions its curving, wave-like shape. Curated by Lisa Melandri, Exective Director.