ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the exhibitions featured in our spring/summer 2026 season, on view March 6–August 9, 2026.
And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art, and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Claude Cahun (b. Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (b. Suzanne Malherbe, 1892-1972), were visionary, gender non-conforming artists and activists born in Nantes, France. Combining rarely seen photographs and photo-collages with drawings, publications, and historic ephemera, this exhibition celebrates their creative output, lifelong partnership, and risk-taking political activism.
Beyond Cahun’s and Moore’s association with Surrealist artists in Paris in the 1920s, visitors will discover how surprising familial entanglements drew these lovers together and sustained their relationship, and how their anti-fascist resistance against the Nazis nearly cost them their lives. As it shares a full and holistic portrait of these artists and their passions, tribulations, and accomplishments, this exhibition offers an extraordinary story with poignant relevance in today’s sociopolitical climate.
And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator, and Svetlana Kitto, writer and oral historian, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.
Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine
Based in Northern Minnesota, Andrea Carlson (b. 1979, Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent) challenges historical erasures and fictions through powerful mixed-media works. At the core of Carlson’s practice is an opposition to the colonial impulse to own and conquer. Carlson’s large-scale paintings interrogate longing and desire, permission and refusal, and celebrate efforts to reclaim ancestral land.
Endless Sunshine includes the artist’s first paintings on birchbark, a material she harvests from her Lake Superior homeland. Additional selections of paintings, as well as screenprints and sculptures, investigate how land can hold stories of power, potential, and dispossession. Endless Sunshine invites audiences to consider how landscapes are imagined and remembered, and how art can illuminate paths toward collective healing and self-determination.
Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.
Ayana Evans: Teaser
Teaser presents New York-based artist Ayana Evans’s video work You gotta watch this sh*t (2018) as a nightly projection on the Museum’s facade. As Evans cycles through exaggerated facial expressions, emotional registers, and poses in a signature neon green, zebra-striped catsuit, she confronts viewers with shifting performances of identity. Evans’s video exposes dissonances between character and humanity, surface and interiority, and invites viewers to reflect on the variability of selfhood. While destabilizing expectations of a singular “authentic” self, Evans claims space for multiplicity, contradiction, confidence, and individual determination.
The exhibition’s title—Teaser—alludes to the artist’s emotional playfulness, and also anticipates her forthcoming survey exhibition Nobody’s Gonna Love You the Way I Do, which will be on view at CAM from September 10, 2026–February 7, 2027.
Ayana Evans: Teaser is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.
