Upcoming Exhibitions
Everyday Histories by Aggie Toppins
Curated Gallery
June 12 - July 18, 2026
Artist Talk: June 12, 2026 | 6-6:30 pm
Opening Reception: June 12, 2026 | 6:30-8 pm
Aggie Toppins creates collage using materials found in archives, midcentury magazines, and daily life to index everyday experience and access the historical imagination. Toppins asks questions about how the past remains in the present, with a particular interest in gendered discourses of class. As a graphic designer by training, she is drawn to the polysemous potential of fragmentary forms. She combines her studio background with historical methods to position these fragments as primary sources. Upon revisiting, recombining, and reinterpreting these sources, she makes pictures that engage viewers in cognizant acts of translation.
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw the historical source as an assemblage, a composite of multiple contingent meanings. Sources bear witness to the idea that every moment in time inhabits, and is inhabited by, other times. Walter Benjamin similarly relayed thoughts about temporal conflation through his metaphor of the “dialectical” or “stand-still” image. Although Benjamin never fully developed this idea in his published writing, the stand-still image seems to represent a moment of arrest in which we the living suddenly recognize yesterday’s slain and silenced as the harbingers of our own political struggles. By collecting, arranging, and re-presenting extant cultural materials, Toppins hopes to figure something like a stand-still image. In making her work, she asks how much of a sign, and how many, are necessary to conjure this sort of recognition? To what extent does the collage image, which puts indeterminacy on display, invite multiple readings? In what ways can images deliver the idea that this moment is not one but several?
Everyday Histories is a recent body of work in which she explores three generations of family history. Toppins was raised almost entirely by women, many of whom have passed on, with roots in rural Ohio and the coal mines of West Virginia. Her grandmothers were born during the Great Depression and raised their children during the Cold War, an era marked by gains in civil rights as well as the threat of total annihilation. Yet they left behind little evidence that they ever existed. Through collage, she traces the contours of their being, contrasting the material and symbolic realities of their lives against visual evidence of the continuation of patriarchal power.
Predicated on resourcefulness, collage is a way of “making sense” by “making do,” something her grandmothers, in their poverty, knew much about. The sustained practice of this patchwork medium calls attention to the historical marginalization of women’s work. None of these images are meant to represent coherent narratives. Rather, they are like archaeological reconstructions, to borrow words from Melissa Meyer and Miriam Shapiro, that invite viewers to decipher as they sift through layers of time.
True North by CB Adams
Ramp Gallery
June 12 - July 18, 2026
Artist Talk: June 12, 2026 | 6-6:30 pm
Opening Reception: June 12, 2026 | 6:30-8 pm
True North begins with a return. For more than fifteen years, I’ve walked North St. Louis, following light, form, and what remains as the landscape shifts. Many of these places now exist only in these prints. I feel that most in the darkroom, bringing the image forward while knowing the place itself has already slipped away. My great-grandmother lived in the neighborhood anchored by St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, and that history still holds in the streets and structures that remain. True North reflects a way of seeing that stays steady, unsentimental, and open to what persists.
Multiplicity: The Power of the Print
Juried Gallery
June 12 - July 18, 2026
Opening Reception: June 12, 2026 | 6:30-8 pm
This exhibition aims to highlight current trends in contemporary American printmaking and shine a spotlight on a cross-section of artists working in a variety of traditional, alternative, and experimental print processes.
Juror: Dave DiMarchi
Dave DiMarchi is a queer, multi-disciplinary artist working in printmaking, papermaking and sculptural book forms. Nurturing ideas into singular and editioned works, he engages in a relentless material practice. As a multi-disciplinary artist, he has exhibited works on paper, installations and books in the US and internationally. In addition to teaching printmaking, papermaking and book forms throughout the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania area, he maintains a small collaborative studio and art space in New Hope, Pennsylvania. In autumn of 2022, he was announced as the Arts Council of Princeton’s Anne Reeves Artist-in-Residence, through which he developed a practice of collage-based multimedia and print works. He also serves as the Arts Council’s Printmaking Studios Manager and Master Printer. For nearly 15 years, he has created his own work, curated exhibitions, provided print exchange opportunities, and published fine art prints as 9INHANDPRESS, a fine art printmaking and education studio located in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Solo Exhibition By Leslie Song
Curated Gallery
July 31 - August 29, 2026
Opening Reception: July 31 | 6:30-8 pm
Artist Talk: July 31 | 6-6:30 pm
MindApps – Insights Within By Clayvon Wesley
Ramp Gallery
July 31 - August 29, 2026
Opening Reception: July 31 | 6:30-8 pm
Artist Talk: July 31 | 6-6:30 pm
MindApps - Insights Within is a series that codifies the visual language of an interior monologue on reflection, integration, and aging. Where the cracked panes symbolize life’s hurts and traumas, healed and unhealed, and blank spaces, things willingly or unwillingly forgotten. Then, among those micro spaces are what Leonardo da Vinci calls “miracles of error,” the mental mistakes that lead to discovery and creation. While seen as atypical of his previous work, the series is heavily influenced by travels to Senegal, Egypt, and South Africa, where Wesley studied the Ndebele artwork of Dr. Esther Mahlangu.
The canvas flat board houses the MindApp's circuitry, firing synapses, consciously and subconsciously, and walking the viewer through micro-spaces of confusion, memory, reflection, and resolution into a broader narrative of understanding and commonality between people. Each micro painting in each square is, in essence, a new beginning. This movement is slow and deliberate. As a Futuristic Surrealist, he is interested in developing artwork as pathways to traverse the universe in search of his individual place and purposes.
We discover ourselves in many ways as we evolve from imperfection to perfection. We discover our humanity and our ability to connect with our past, present, and—hopefully—a promising future of humanism. This spiritual connectivity to the divine cosmology in which we live is what Wesley, as an artist, is expressing.
Order and Chaos
Juried Gallery
July 31 - August 29, 2026
Opening Reception: September 4 | 6:30-8 pm
Order and Chaos explores the tension between structure and spontaneity within abstract art. In abstraction, order may appear as symmetry, logic, or restraint, while chaos erupts as intuition, fragmentation, and unpredictability. Yet neither state exists alone. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how balance is negotiated and how beauty can arise from instability.
Juror: Ethan Meyer
Ethan Meyer (born 1990) is a painter and mixed media / fiber sculptor. He graduated with his BA in Studio Art from Webster University, St. Louis in 2013. He has worked for Duane Reed Gallery since 2015; and has been in the role of Gallery Director since 2020. His work, both in painting and sculpture, involves networks of intricately connected, overlapping, and morphing shapes and patterns, reflecting the complex and ever-changing nature of one’s own consciousness. Meyer’s work may be found in collections across the US as well as Canada, England, Germany, and New Zealand.
Lost in Transcreation: An inquiry into belonging with Ria Unson and Hope Ainsworth
Curated Gallery
September 4 - October 10, 2026
Opening Reception: September 4 | 6:30-8 pm
Artist Talk: September 4 | 6-6:30 pm
Through a “call and response” process, two multidisciplinary artists create a collection of work based on a series of prompts around the themes of identity and perception and how these concepts shape their lived experiences as Filipina-Americans. Through 2D and 3D work with paint, glue, found objects, and textiles, Hope and Ria explore what it means to be translated, mediated, or just be confusing. What kind of material remains when two women engage in an excavation of third culture? How does their ongoing conversation mirror a broader one as it relates to meaningful connection across cultural collision?
Solo Exhibition By Rita Chu
Ramp Gallery
September 4 - October 10, 2026
Opening Reception: September 4 | 6:30-8 pm
Artist Talk: September 4 | 6-6:30 pm
St. Louis Artists’ Guild Members Exhibition
Juried Gallery
September 4 - October 10, 2026
Deadline to enter: August 1, 2026 at Midnight