Ronald Young celebrates the hard-won beauty of uninhabited sites throughout St. Louis. Through his work, Young elevates salvaged materials including weathered domestic hardware, nails, and disintegrating wooden molding into compelling, multilayered sculptures. Young celebrates the resiliency of disenfranchised communities, calling attention to these sites before all memory of their existence is erased.

Exploring sites throughout St. Louis, Ronald Young scavenges the items he incorporates into his multilayered sculptures. He combines objects like doorknobs and rusted tools with charred wood, rope, bricks, chains, and nails--always plenty of nails. Through his efforts, Young reveals local material and economic realities: In St. Louis, he finds these items in buildings that have fallen into disrepair and elevates them into compelling artworks that celebrate this hard-won beauty.

Young is inspired by African nkisi, sculptural objects made by Kongo artists and used in ritual ceremonies. Nkisi can refer to spirits or the sculptures in which they reside, and each nail driven into the object is a spiritual vow between humans and non-human sources of power. Drawing inspiration from these ancient rituals and traditions, Young's sculptures focus this energy. Through his handiwork, Young makes gestures of reparation and restoration, and signals his care for St. Louis. He shows us that even in the midst of crisis--or perhaps because of it--it is possible to find moments of beauty and reckoning.

Text: Dean Daderko and Misa Jeffereis

A collaboration between the Gateway Foundation and the Contemporary Art Museum, the Great Rivers Biennial initiative, now in its 11th season, is meant to provide three emerging and mid-career artists from the St. Louis area grant funding – $20,000 each – and six months of exhibition space at the museum for their creations.

For Ronald Young, who has spent much of his 33-year career as a painter, it was an opportunity to share a different side of his practice: sculpture. Young’s sculptures utilize reclaimed materials from disused and abandoned buildings, mostly from St. Louis’ north side where there is an abundance of neglected infrastructure. He told St. Louis on the Air that, in a way, the items call out to him.

“It's really a process of elimination. A lot of it is just me trusting my instinct. I ride through the neighborhood. I'll see certain objects. In the beginning I was just gathering things, but now it's very specific,” Young said, “[Like] bricks, any type of hardware that appears to be unusual, [or] wood already burnt from the buildings that I find them in.”

The Great Rivers Biennial is a regional art award and exhibition hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. This program, in partnership with the Gateway Foundation, supports emerging and mid-career artists from the St. Louis area, offering them a platform to showcase their work and provides funding to further their artistic careers. The Biennial highlights thought-provoking works that reflect the diverse creative landscape of St. Louis.

The 2024 GRB artists are Saj Issa, Basil Kincaid, and Ronald Young. In this segment, we learn more about each artist’s background and the themes of geography, community, and cultural background that shape their latest pieces. Discover how these artists are pushing the boundaries of contemporary art in St. Louis and beyond.

Alongside the 2024 Great Rivers Biennial, be sure to explore Shinichi Sawada: Agents of Clay, Ad Minoliti: Manifestación Pluriversal, Charles Atlas: Painting by Numbers, and the Teen Studio Exhibition: glyneisha.

60 days before the United States presidential election, three St. Louis artists ask us to see beyond the ordinary and envision something more than just what lies in front of us.
As I step through the entryway doors of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), I feel transported into a different world. Although I grew up in the melting pot of Houston, Texas, I have spent the last two years becoming familiar with Kansas City’s art spaces and I ignorantly anticipated a similar older, wealthy, majority-white crowd among the visitors at the museum’s Fall/Winter 2024 exhibitions opening. However, if I had known that this kind of Missourian diversity was only a four hour drive away, I wouldn’t have waited so long to make this my first visit to St. Louis.
The opening on September 6 celebrated six new exhibitions, but the highly anticipated Great Rivers Biennial is the main source of the evening’s energetic buzz. Since 2003, the Great Rivers Biennial Award has recognized and fostered the creativity of artists in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Out of 96 applicants, three artists were selected by a panel of out-of-state jurors for their exhibition proposals that amplified ancestral craft and personal definitions of “home” through ceramics, paintings, video, textiles, and sculptural assemblage. For its eleventh iteration, the deserving recipients of the 2024 Great Rivers Biennial Award are Basil Kincaid, Saj Issa, and Ronald Young.
Upon arrival at the gallery, I pause to take it all in—the diverse community of people in attendance, the R&B music spilling into the space from the DJ in the adjacent gallery, and from where I was standing, I can easily preview the work of all three artists at once. To my left, the colorful fibers in Basil Kincaid’s Loose Frequencies dance and weave around one another within their white frame, seemingly echoing the energetic hum of excited voices that fill the gallery. To my right, nine figurative assemblages convene in a large bed of soil. These tall, wooden sculptures, adorned with jute spun into thick rope and found hardware, stand alert and at attention. Eight assemblages from Ronald Young’s Totem Pole series, guarded by the strong railroad spikes and a lightning rod that embellishes their counterpart, Gatekeeper, appears regal in stature; radiating an energy that whispers “I have a story to tell.”

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.