Image: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is entering the final stretch of three spring exhibitions, with one photography survey, one sound installation and one graduate thesis show all slated to close later this month. In a newsletter sent July 3, the museum urged visitors to see the exhibitions before they end, while noting that it will also be open on Independence Day, Saturday, July 4, from 11 am to 5 pm.
The earliest closing exhibition is 'Looking Back Toward the Future: Contemporary Photography from China', on view through July 20. The museum says the presentation includes more than forty large-scale photographs created in China between 1993 and 2006, recently gifted to the museum and being shown for the first time. The exhibition brings together work made over a period of more than a decade and situates it within the museum’s collection, where the newly acquired photographs are now publicly accessible.
Also closing this month is Emeka Ogboh’s 'The Song of the Germans', on view through July 27. The installation is described by the museum as a sound work featuring ten African immigrants singing the German national anthem, played continuously, with a new organization each time. The work’s structure places repetition at the center of the experience, while its source material and presentation frame questions of language, belonging and public sound.
The third exhibition in the museum’s summer closeout is 'Apparition: 2026 MFA in Visual Art Thesis Exhibition', also on view through July 27. The show features thesis projects by the 2026 MFA in Visual Art graduates of the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Art. Presented as a culminating student exhibition, it offers a look at the range of approaches emerging from the program at a moment when the academic year has just concluded.
Alongside the exhibition notices, the museum also listed several July public programs. A workshop titled 'What Remains: Artifacts, Memory, and Stories of Place' is scheduled for Wednesday, July 15, from 4:30 to 7:30 pm in the Museum Lobby. The two-part workshop will combine guided discussion, a gallery tour and hands-on bookmaking, beginning with artist-created artifacts from St. Louis history and continuing with a handmade book project inspired by memory, place and personal history. The museum says the program is free and open to the public, with no prior bookmaking experience required.
Two additional July events are also on the calendar: 'Kemper Refresh: Meditation and Creation' on July 8 from 10 to 11:30 am, and 'Storytime and Art-Making' on July 18 from 10 am to 12 pm, both in the Museum Lobby. The museum’s summer lineup is set against a permanent collection spotlight on Jules Dupré’s 'The River', described by the museum as a modest Barbizon landscape centered on a lone tree, on view in the Gertrude Bernoudy Gallery, Room 2.
