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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