Check this page often for upcoming exhibition announcements. For any questions about current exhibitions, please call 314-516-7248 or email MercantileLibrary@umsl.edu.
Now on View:
Casting a Long Shadow: Frederick Oakes Sylvester & His Circle
Level 2, Wallace H. Smith Gallery of Art
Casting a Long Shadow: Frederick Oakes Sylvester and His Circle celebrates the role of this esteemed artist, whose work is an anchor of the Mercantile Library’s collection, St. Louis’s cultural development during Sylvester’s time here, and the shared influences among his contemporaries and followers.
This exhibition, inspired by an ongoing Catalog Raisonné of Sylvester’s work, is drawn almost exclusively from the Mercantile Library Art Museum’s ever-growing collection of Missouri art and supporting rare books, reflecting the museum’s mission to tell the story of Missouri and the nation’s heartland region by collecting, exhibiting and providing a venue for Missouri art and artists and encouraging partnerships between scholars, artists, collectors and the region’s cultural community. This mission grows from the library’s earliest days when its collection and exhibitions earned it the name “the city’s first art gallery.”
Through close relationships with artists like Charles Deas and George Caleb Bingham, the early Mercantile was a haven for art, artists, and art lovers. Over time, regional art came into the spotlight with the artwork of Thomas Hart Benton and the scholarship of art historian William Gerdts, whose seminal Art Across America in 1990 brought regional artists from across the country to the attention of the art world like never before. This scholarship inspires our mission and serves as a foundation for exhibitions like this one, presented as the inaugural exhibition for the Wallace H. Smith Gallery of Art, so generously funded by the Bellwether Foundation, with additional funding from the Kemper Foundation and the Orthwein Foundation. This new gallery, so strongly supported by the major arts foundations of St. Louis, marks the beginning of an exciting new era in the Mercantile’s art mission.
A full-color catalog accompanies the exhibition that can be purchased at the Mercantile's gift shop, The Lantern.
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Three Great Women Printmakers and Artists of the Book
This exhibition examines works on paper by three of the greatest printmakers and paper artists of the twentieth century: Shirley Jones (b. 1934); Claire Van Vliet (b. 1933); and Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993). Each has received international acclaim for book arts masterpieces as well as works in other arts media and all have become synonymous with stylistic excellence and inspiration.
A Closer Look at Claire Van Vliet and the Janus Press
A Seventy Year Love Affair with Paper, Printing, Book Illustration and Design
For seventy years the Janus Press, founded by Claire Van Vliet (b. 1933) in the mid-1950s and eventually permanently located in northern Vermont, has been synonymous with fine printing and book design. The Mercantile Library has collected Van Vliet’s work—broadsides, illustrations, printing ephemera, as well as major productions of books and portfolios for many years—and has built a strong collection of a graphic artist who has stretched dramatically the boundaries of the genre known as artist’s books. Van Vliet pioneered in paper engineering and binding structures, in paper design and use, most notably in a remarkable series of landscapes and “cloudscapes” created with dyed paper pulp as shown in the Seifert Gallery currently, and in theme and presentation. This artist has essentially defined the fine press book for the last half century through her innovative use of the traditions of her craft in colorful productions which will stand the test of time. Van Vliet’s artistry has been widely exhibited across the nation and further afield in rare book libraries and museums. She has received many awards, including a MacArther Genius Grant in 1989. The collection at the Mercantile Library is a representative cross section of the work of Van Vliet (1) as a traditional illustrator using various engraving styles such as woodcuts and etchings, (2) as an innovative collaborator with artists, authors and poets, reflecting interests as widely disparate as the lives of women, to nature, religious art and Shakespeare, and (3) as an energetic experimenter with the tools of her art—paper, ink, and type.
