Since 2004, the Great Rivers Biennial (GRB)—a collaborative initiative between CAM and the Gateway Foundation—recognizes and fosters artistic talent in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. The artists selected receive $20,000 in unrestricted funding and are featured in the Great Rivers Biennial exhibition at CAM.

For the 2024 Biennial, artists Saj Issa, Basil Kincaid, and Ronald Young have proposed exhibitions that involve ceramics, paintings, video, textiles, and sculptural assemblage. The three award winners were unanimously chosen in summer 2023 by a distinguished panel of independent jurors: Rita Gonzalez, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Caroline Kent, a Chicago-based artist and Assistant Professor of Painting at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. The jurors made the selection after visiting the studios of ten semifinalist artists who were chosen from a pool of 96 applicants.

Great Rivers Biennial 2024 is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator and Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, with support from Grace Early, Exhibitions Assistant.

The St. Louis Artists' Guild's new set of exhibits explores spiritual healing through the practice of art. Beyond Belief is a group show examining the human spirit and inspiration, Everything Falls Apart by Ronald Young is a mixed media exhibit contemplating the state of modern society, and Still Point by Christine Ilewski is a collection of moving vignettes along the Mississippi River.
All three exhibits continue through May 13, 2023. To learn more please visit www.stlouisartistsguild.org.

RE: Artist as Medium allows for a deeper consideration of questions raised by Gala Porras-Kim’s exhibition, "Correspondences towards the living object". What are the ways in which an artist can create or conjure the voices of objects? How do artists help us have empathy for an object and the stories or intentions they represent?

These questions and more were considered in a roundtable discussion guided by Ronald Young, a St. Louis-based artist whose work builds on the tradition of power objects made by African and African Diasporic artists—objects that may contain or transmute spirits. Young was in conversation with collaborators who are invested in the ways artists can serve as a medium to connect with an object, including:

Adrienne Davis, collector and scholar
Renée Brummell Franklin, Chief Diversity Officer at the Saint Louis Art Museum
Thomas Sleet, artist
Pat Smith Thurman, Co-Founder of 10th Street Gallery

St. Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D. Goodwin spoke with Young about how he developed his sculptural technique and what his work says about the hidden history and endurance of St. Louis’ historically Black neighborhoods.

In “The Prevalence of Ritual,” Ronald Young uses found materials with deep histories to create sculptures rich in ambiguity. He creates power objects from these materials to “embody the collective consciousness of generations of African Americans.” For more information, go to www.kranzbergartsfoundation.org.

A review of The Prevalence of Ritual at the Kranzberg by Del O'Brien published in Sixty Inches From Center.

Ronald Young’s art exhibition explores African diaspora and concept behind power objects.

Excerpts from my artist talk during my Summer Residency at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California in 2019. I describe my creative process of using "lost&found" objects to create mixed-media assemblages.

In this Q&A, Young discusses his work, life in St. Louis and the beauty of rough materials.