ST LOUIS, MO.- Counterpublic, a triennial exhibition based in St. Louis, Missouri, and one of the largest public art exhibitions in the United States, is pleased to announce the 47 participating artists, duos, and collectives gathered from around the world for its third edition, Coyote Time. On view September 12–December 12, 2026, Counterpublic 2026 will present ambitious new commissions and historical reinterpretations furthering their mission to reimagine art’s role in public life.

Unfolding across five key sites shaped by St. Louis’s historical and civic conditions, Coyote Time brings together artists engaging urgent issues including education, climate, technology, and immigration. The title, Coyote Time, draws from Alice Bucknell’s 2026 triennial commission, a video game set within St. Louis’ City Museum, and refers to the brief moment in gameplay that allows a player to decide between leaping forward or returning to safety. For its 2026 edition, curated by Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush, Counterpublic invites you to inhabit Coyote Time, framing uncertainty as a space for experimentation, risk, and possibility.

“The Coyote Time artist list is decidedly diasporic in scope, reflecting a global outlook while remaining rooted in St. Louis at a moment marked by renewed borders and divisions,” says James McAnally, Executive and Artistic Director of Counterpublic. “Artists and collectives are drawn equally from the exhibition’s immediate neighborhoods and the Global South, bringing multilingual and multifaceted perspectives to questions of civic structures, migration, identity, and technology. Across nearly fifty commissions, Coyote Time takes a speculative and socially oriented approach to the moment.”

The curatorial ensemble, Jordan Carter, Raphael Fonseca, Stefanie Hessler, Nora N. Khan, and Wanda Nanibush, adds: “Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time gathers artists working across material practice, time-based media, and emergent technologies. Together, they address contested questions of our historical moment around the terms of civic life, displacement, ecological crisis, and the accelerating entanglements of computation and lived experience. Each artist engages local and site-responsive practices with wider international considerations and reverberations. In the face of these structural and political conditions, the artists offer patient, searching and speculative propositions and poetic reckonings that expand the range of what is imaginable, thinkable, and possible. In Coyote Time, the suspended instant after the leap is itself the form to consider.”

Emerging from a grassroots model first realized in 2019 through activations across barbershops, bakeries, parks, and other community spaces in St. Louis, each edition of Counterpublic is designed to produce lasting impact across institutions, communities, and public life, both locally and within the broader cultural field. Grounded in the pressing questions of St. Louis, shared nationally and globally, Coyote Time moves beyond symbolic gesture, pairing artists with resonant sites to realize responsive new works of significant ambition and visionary scale, advancing new models for action on issues of immigration, climate, and education.

Stretching along the edge of downtown St. Louis in neighborhoods on each end of the Gateway Arch, the Mississippi Riverfront hosts over a dozen site-responsive works that reconnect the city to the river. Anchored by major new commissions by artists Glenn Ligon and Rebecca Belmore, the works extend across post-industrial sites, waterfront pathways, and a former public aquarium activated by Max Hooper Schneider. Emerging technologies come to the fore with LI Yi-Fan, Alice Bucknell, Cooper Jacoby, and others.

Located in North St. Louis, The Ville, one of the city’s most significant Black neighborhoods, will situate projects engaging the urgencies of rebuilding and reimagining civic space following a devastating tornado in 2025. Centered around the historic Sumner High School, whose alumni include Tina Turner, Arthur Ashe, Dick Gregory, and Grace Bumbry, Counterpublic has continued to collaborate with the school and its students in shaping new works, including a series by Timmy Simonds commemorating the history of the school as a home of a teachers college. Across surrounding neighborhood lots, churches, and community centers, artists propose vibrant approaches to history and resilient futures, including alternative infrastructures by St. Louis artists Dail Chambers and the People’s Art and Recreation Center (PARC), alongside public works by Tony Cokes, Margaret Honda, and others.
Five miles south, the International Institute of St. Louis, a critical resource for newly arrived immigrants, will be activated through artist-led projects by Petrit Halilaj, Inès Kivimäki, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. Taking place amid escalating global debates around migration, here, each artist defiantly foregrounds celebratory and communal visions of home. Each project will extend the Institute’s century-long role as a site of connection and belonging, while the introduction of a year-long fellowship, in the wake of federal defunding, ensures continuity of the Institute’s essential programs for newly arrived Americans. This site stretches along the dense neighborhoods of South Grand, culminating in the last Carnegie Library built with a project by Venezuelan-born and St. Louis based artist Sebastián Llovera.

Crossing east of the Mississippi River, the National Building Arts Center (NBAC), an emerging arts institution housed within a decommissioned steel foundry and home to the embedded art space NON STNDRD, will serve as a site for climate-focused commissions. Located within the former Monsanto company town, large-scale artist projects by Chris Carl and Carolina Caycedo engage the site’s legacy as one of the departure points for the global climate crisis. In this setting, works probe the limits of climate regeneration in a time of crisis, testing long-term remediation strategies and counter ecologies.

Across the city, Counterpublic will partner with institutions including Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Kemper Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Saint Louis Art Museum, Kranzberg Arts Foundation, and The Luminary to present collaborative commissions and concurrent exhibitions, extending the triennial across the city’s vibrant cultural landscape. Details on each institution’s exhibitions and opening dates will follow along with a small number of additional artist announcements.