In the ongoing project Significant and Insignificant Mounds, photographer Jennifer Colten and writer Jesse Vogler pair images and texts to bring historic and contemporary landscapes into dialogue. The special exhibition Art Along the Rivers: A Bicentennial Celebration includes three photographs from this project. In addition, the artists designed six billboards installed in the Mississippi River floodplain in Illinois, just east of St. Louis, an area often known as the American Bottom. The billboards feature words and phrases drawn from historical or theoretical texts superimposed upon photographs of earthen mounds—most taken by Colten as part of the Significant and Insignificant Mounds series.

In the early 19th century, St. Louis and the surrounding metropolitan region earned the nickname “Mound City” for the numerous earthen mounds that dotted its landscape. These monumental earthworks were created between 900 and 1600 by the Mississippian culture, which was centered at Cahokia and flourished in the midwestern and southeastern regions of North America. Yet, just a fraction of these ancient mounds survive, as the majority were destroyed under the guise of urban and industrial development. Instead, a layered history is embedded in the present-day landscape, where the few remaining earthworks share space with modern mounds, in the form of landfills, slag heaps, and other remnants of industrial activity.

Significant and Insignificant Mounds asks viewers to consider the tangled and contradictory present in relation to the long histories that still mark these landscapes. Colten’s and Vogler’s project calls attention to how individuals and communities have defined human interventions into the landscape across time and raises questions about ownership, power, and the racial and cultural erasures that have occurred across this land. The billboards themselves do not have singular meanings. Rather, they instigate conversations and open possibilities for thinking, inquiry, and contemplation. The work draws attention to shifts in land use and its contingent value and how changes over time reflect evolving cultural judgments. These thought-provoking images and statements deftly address notions of landscape and materiality by interrogating the ways in which meaning, narrative, and evolving signification of place is both made and lost.

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Double Presence

Location: Intersection of Liberty Avenue and Mississippi Avenue, East St. Louis, IL 62201

Dates: October 11, 2021 – December 26, 2021

This billboard features a photograph of an earthen mound situated within a residential neighborhood. The phrase “Double Presence” superimposed over the image comes from a 1908 statement by E. O. Randall, who served as the Secretary of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society. From his perspective in the early 20th century, Randall observed the difficulty of attaching language to the significance of mounds made before the 18th century. Here, Colten and Vogler draw attention to that challenge. They emphasize not only the profundity of extant historic mounds but also their absence across the landscape, as many no longer stand in their original state. This billboard refers to the continuing double presence of the landscape, where history lingers within the ever-shifting contemporary moment.

There was a double presence which was forced upon the mind—the presence of those who since the beginning of historic times have visited the region and gazed upon this very monument and written descriptions of it, one after the other, until a volume of literature has accumulated; and the presence of those who in prehistoric times filled the valley with their works, but were unable to make any record of themselves except such as is contained in these silent witnesses.

– E. O. Randall, 1908

Bundle of Silences

Location: On the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge, visible on left (north) side, just before Front Street, while traveling from Missouri to Illinois

Dates: October 25 – December 26, 2021

This billboard presents the phrase “bundle of silences” superimposed over an image of a large mound. The phrase directly references the work of Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. In his groundbreaking 1995 work, Silencing the Past, Trouillot argues that unequal power structures create and reinforce historical narratives, reminding us that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.” These silences are found not just in academic histories, but in how history is discussed and preserved. Power systems determine how societies remember the past, tell stories, and establish historical significance. However, the phrase, “Bundle of Silences,” is multifaceted. It also recalls real estate transactions in which the term “a bundle of rights” is used to explain the complexities of property ownership. This billboard, situated on a bridge between two modern-day states, draws attention to the ways in which land “ownership” is a more complex proposition than simply acquiring legal rights.

Blind Spots

Location: On the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge, visible on left (north) side while traveling from Missouri to Illinois

Dates: October 25 – December 26, 2021

This billboard features a photograph taken in 1869 by Thomas Easterly reproduced beneath the words “Blind Spots.” The original image shows nine men standing on the top of Big Mound, which was the largest of the Mississippian mounds, situated just north of present-day downtown St. Louis, near the Missouri entrance to the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. Though this monumental earthwork had inspired St. Louis’s nickname, “Mound City,” 19th-century civic leaders came to view it as an impediment to urban development as the city expanded northward. By 1869, Big Mound was entirely demolished, and its remains were used in the building of the North Missouri Railroad along the river. This image and its superimposed text reference the constant blind spots in collective knowledge of the complex histories of shared landscape. Through their use of this historic image, Colten and Vogler highlight what has been suppressed, made invisible, or “blind” to contemporary awareness. The phrase also has a double meaning itself. It references the work of photographer and critic Teju Cole, whose book Blind Spots examines photography as a medium and its relationship to language, images, and the act of witnessing.

Possession/Dispossession

Location: Intersection of Collinsville Road and N. 63rd Street (near 6303 Collinsville Road), East St Louis, IL 62201

Dates: November 1 – December 12, 2021

A pair of words—”Possession” and “Dispossession”— is superimposed across a single image that covers two side-by-side billboards. Colten photographed a mound of zinc residue left behind from the American Zinc Corporation in nearby Fairmont City, whose operations ended in the 1960s. Due to the extraction of resources in the area, Fairmont City is currently under EPA remediation. These two billboards present an invitation to consider the complicated, layered history of the land across time and conditions. Following the decline of the Mississippian culture in the 17th century, the lands in the American Bottom were inhabited by the Osage, Missouria, and Illini Nations. Beginning in the early 19th century, these sovereign Indigenous nations were gradually dispossessed of their lands through multiple broken treaties with the U.S. government. These events preceded the possession of the land through capitalism, which further contributed to the contemporary precarious state of environmental and economic conditions. This billboard reflects on the multiple and conflicting forces upon humanity and the landscape across this region over centuries, which have manifested in cycles of ownership, power, extraction, inhabitation, and displacement.