Installation view of Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration
This audio guide features 15 commentaries on objects created over the past 1,000 years near the confluence of some of the continent’s most powerful rivers—the Mississippi and Missouri. Listen to a general introduction, narrators from the Saint Louis Art Museum, and voices from the confluence region community.
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AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT
The audio guide transcript is available to view on your own device.
Introduction
- Transcript
Speaker: Melissa Wolfe
Curator of American Art
Saint Louis Art MuseumHello, I’m Melissa Wolfe, curator of American art at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the audio guide for Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration, an exhibition we’ve organized in conjunction with the 200th anniversary of Missouri’s statehood. It presents extraordinary objects produced or collected within the area defined by the confluence of the powerful Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, an area we have aptly defined as the confluence region. The paintings, sculptures, drawings, furniture, ceramics, metals, textiles, and many other artistic forms span over 1,000 years of creative production. They tell us rich and wide-ranging stories about their makers, their communities, and their subjects. Some of these stories we know quite well, while others might be new to the majority of us. Some stories highlight the strength of their communities. Others bring us to acknowledge the very real disparities under which their artists worked.
Many of these objects have never been considered in the context of the objects installed right next to them. However, the exhibition gathers them together to ask us to be curious and enter into the fresh and often surprising dialogues that prove their continued relevance to our experiences today.
This exhibition audio guide offers 14 commentaries by speakers who come from a wide range of backgrounds and interests, all highlighting the extraordinary collaboration this exhibition received from so many regional communities and institutions. You will hear perspectives that range from the scholarly to the very personal. But all, we hope, will amplify the deeply resonant meanings held within these objects.
We encourage you to experience this guide in any order you like; you may follow it in numeric order or pick and choose. Each featured object can be located by following the floorplan on this webpage or by identifying the audio icon on the object’s label in the exhibition. Whether you’re listening from home or in the Museum galleries, I hope you enjoy this audio guide and your visit to Art Along the Rivers.
- Gallery Text
The 200th anniversary of Missouri’s statehood provides an opportunity to explore the vibrant creative heritage of the area surrounding St. Louis. Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration brings together over 150 extraordinary works of art produced or collected within the “confluence region,” an elongated area that crosses through present-day Missouri and Illinois. Though small, this region has played an outsized role in the history of North America due to the meeting of powerful rivers, trails, and routes within its borders.
This exhibition acknowledges the inequities and conflicts in the confluence region that empower some artistic voices and silence others. Missouri’s statehood was granted with the deep scars of legalized slavery. This situation imposed inhumane conditions on the creative expression of African Americans. Indigenous peoples, including the Osage, Illini, Missouria, and ancient Mississippians, served as the land’s caretakers for centuries. In 1803, the United States claimed political control of the region, enabling white Americans to force the removal of Native American nations in a drive to profit from the land’s natural resources.
Art Along the Rivers amplifies the many complex stories offered by the remarkable works of art it presents. The exhibition comprises an incredible variety of objects produced over 1,000 years. Arranged into five thematic sections, these artworks engage each other and viewers in vibrant and often surprising dialogues that reveal their individual and collective visual power.
Learn More
The Confluence Region Map highlighting St. Louis, Missouri.
