Uncertain times can challenge things we take for granted. Peace, democracy, civil discourse, the built and natural environments — all have been tested in recent years.
But uncertain times also can create productive instabilities, opening the door to new ideas and new visions of the future. In this spirit, the Washington University in St. Louis Kemper Art Museum’s 2025 exhibition lineup will question canonical narratives, interrogate colonial imaginaries and reexamine complex historical entanglements.
Opening in February will be “Seeds: Containers of a World to Come.” The first of two major loan exhibitions, “Seeds” will feature 10 contemporary artists representing a diversity of geographical and cultural contexts, from Africa and the Americas to the Middle East and Western Europe. In September, “Making Their Mark” will showcase dozens of significant artworks from the Shah Garg Collection, which is dedicated to modern and contemporary women artists.
In addition to the temporary loan shows, the museum will present several newly conceived installations of its renowned permanent collection. These include “Reframing the 19th Century,” which pairs collection highlights with long-term loans from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. “Printmaking for a New ‘America’” surveys prints from the past 50 years that critically address U.S. political flashpoints, while “Technological Transformations: Experimentation and Photography” highlights the ways new and old technologies have persistently challenged our expectations of the photograph.
“The Kemper Art Museum is committed to exploring artistic approaches — past and present and from around the globe — that demonstrate how innovative, frequently experimental forms of visual creativity can resonate with contemporary societal concerns,” said Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and chief curator of the Kemper Art Museum.
“These ambitious exhibitions and programs reflect the museum’s role as an interface between the cultural and intellectual life on campus, in St. Louis and beyond,” Eckmann added. “Our diverse programs invite visitors from all walks of life to engage in meaningful dialogue.”
‘Seeds: Containers of a World to Come’
February 21–July 28, 2025
Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery
At a moment when ecological concerns are becoming increasingly urgent, “Seeds: Containers of a World to Come” brings into dialogue work by 10 contemporary artists who are illuminating and reframing plant–human–land relations. For Shiraz Bayjoo, Carolina Caycedo, Juan William Chávez, Beatriz Cortez, Ellie Irons, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jumana Manna, Anne Percoco, Cecilia Vicuña and Emmi Whitehorse, the seed is the kernel, literally and metaphorically, of innovative research-based practices that seek to reflect on and reframe issues of fragility, preservation and possibility in the face of the global climate crisis.
2025 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition
May 2 – July 28, 2025
Garen Gallery
This exhibition will feature thesis projects by graduating Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art candidates in WashU’s nationally ranked College & Graduate School of Art. Now part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the college dates to 1879 and was the first professional, university-affiliated art school in the United States. Alumni of the MFA-VA program include MacArthur fellow Ebony Patterson (MFA ’06), Lavar Munroe (MFA ’13) and Kahlil Robert Irving (MFA ’17), among many others.
‘Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection’
Sept 12 – Jan. 5, 2026
Barney A. Ebsworth and Garen galleries
Established by Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, the Shah Garg Collection is committed to amplifying the voices and visions of women artists. “Making Their Mark” brings together more than 60 artworks, spanning nearly eight decades, by Joan Mitchell, Sheila Hicks, Charlene von Heyl, Howardina Pindell, Sonia Gomez and many others. Placing these works in dialogue with one another, the exhibition explores how the artists, especially those working with abstraction, circumvented and broke through conventions in art making by embracing craft techniques, advanced technologies, uncommon materials, bold colors and pattern, and eclectic formal vocabularies. Accompanied by a major publication produced in advance of the exhibition, “Making Their Mark” pays homage to generations of artists whose works transcend prescribed definitions within a historically patriarchal field.
‘Reframing the 19th Century’
June 20, 2024 – ongoing
Gertrude Bernoudy Gallery
The reinstalled 19th-century galleries examine two major themes: Native and settler histories in the Americas and the influence of the French Barbizon school on American art. Important works from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection — by George Caleb Bingham, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles Ferdinand Wimar, among others — are juxtaposed with long-term loans from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The reframing aims to showcase more inclusive narratives of 19th-century artistic production and to foreground understudied histories of race and Indigeneity in the Americas.
