Exploring the Gateway to the West in the SLAM collection

St. Louis appears in art because it sits at a powerful crossroads, geographically, historically, and culturally. The city’s identity as the Gateway to the West along the Mississippi River has made it a powerful image for artists capturing westward expansion. Even more, its complex history attracts artists looking to portray identity, memory, and change. St. Louis is extremely layered, as one can see in representations of the city and its people.

Many visitors might not realize it, but SLAM houses several notable works featuring different aspects of the city. St. Louis and its residents are shown across time, from 19th-century paintings depicting stately homes and carriages to contemporary photographs capturing evolving urban landscapes. We’ve rounded up some of the works below. Several are currently on view in the Museum, and all can be seen on the SLAM website in the extensive online collection.

Charles I

In this painting by Kehinde Wiley, St. Louisan Ashley Cooper stands with a hand on her hip in front of a vibrant, winding floral backdrop. Wiley based Cooper’s pose on the stance of Charles I of England in a 1633 portrait by Dutch painter Daniel Mytens, which is also featured in the SLAM collection. In Charles I, as in many of his other paintings, Wiley uses the common artistic practice of portraiture to address absence and erasure of Black individuals in European and American art. Wiley visited neighborhoods in North St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, to select models, including Cooper, for his paintings. He created portraits like this one for a 2018–19 SLAM exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis. The exhibition featured 11 original portraits of contemporary African American subjects in poses recalling the grand traditions of European and American portraiture.

This painting will return on view this fall in SLAM’s East Building.

A Street in Saint Louis

This painting by Henry Lewis shows a bustling, affluent neighborhood in St. Louis in the mid-19th century. A fine Italianate home with a woman on the porch is pictured in the background. Lewis likely created the painting from a series of sketches he made of houses while working as a scenery painter for the St. Louis Theatre in 1848. He completed this work in Düsseldorf, Germany, which was a haven for American artists at the time and eventually Lewis’s permanent home.

This painting is on view in Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield Gallery 337. Another painting of the city by Lewis, Saint Louis in 1846, is on view in Gallery 336.

View of St. Louis

St. Louis natives might recognize what is now Highway 40 (also known as I-64) in this painting by Joe Jones. Jones created the work in 1932, and it features railroad tracks where the highway now cuts through the city. Multicolored buildings sit in the upper background against a blue sky. Jones depicted St. Louis using crisp, clear colors including shades of blue and red, a departure from starker colors often used by other contemporary artists to capture urban landscapes.

This painting is on view in Marsha and Bill Rusnack Gallery 339.

St. Louis Downtown at Night

This photo by American photographer Thelma Blumberg depicts a night scene in downtown St. Louis in 1960. Blumberg produced the photo at a pivotal moment in St. Louis history, when urban renewal projects started to reshape the city. Nighttime photography offered a way to capture the modernity and atmosphere of a changing urban landscape.

The Bridge

American artist Frederick Oakes Sylvester created this landscape painting of the Eads Bridge in downtown St. Louis in the early 20th century. The orange-and-yellow sunset is reflected on the smooth water of the Mississippi, and factories in the distance release gray smoke into the air on the left. The work exemplifies Sylvester’s studies of light, which viewers can see in his use of light reflections and shadows in the painting.

Untitled #2 (St. Louis)

This photo is one in a series taken by photographer Catherine Opie in St. Louis. In this work, Opie presents an urban landscape recognizable to many city dwellers as the area near Union Station. Opie—a recipient of the 1999–2000 Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship, a residency cosponsored by SLAM and Washington University—immersed herself in the city during her fellowship to document its current conditions and potential for growth. She used an older, panoramic format common at the turn of the 20th century to take modern-day photos of St. Louis, linking the past and present in one work.

‘Danger’, Soulard, St. Louis

American photographer Ken Light took this photo of the St. Louis neighborhood of Soulard when he was only 20 years old. Light was part of a generation of documentary photographers in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were more interested in capturing how people actually lived and less interested in portraying landscapes. The title of the photo, “Danger,” invites interpretation while suggesting the reality of the neighborhood during the ’70s, before its eventual restoration and gentrification.

The Church Supper

This painting depicts a gathering at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in the St. Louis suburb of Des Peres, Missouri, in the 1930s. Longtime church members still fondly recall afternoon picnics like this one, which were held outdoors because the church didn’t have a basement fellowship hall. Notably, artist James Turnbull painted himself in the scene leaning against a tree on the right.