Established in 2003, the Great Rivers Biennial is a collaborative exhibition program presented by CAM and the Gateway Foundation. The initiative identifies talented emerging and mid-career artists working in the greater St. Louis metro area, provides them with financial assistance, and elevates their profile across the Midwest and national art communities.
Apply to be an artist
St. Louis artists can apply to be part of the next Great Rivers Biennial
Twenty Years, Ten Editions
We’re celebrating the Tenth Edition of the Great Rivers Biennial
2024 Artists
Sep 6, 2024 – Feb 9, 2025
Saj Issa
Saj Issa draws on her experience living between St. Louis and Palestine, merging Western and Eastern influences across painting, sculpture, ceramics, and video. Her practice reflects notions of displacement, identity, and the social issues that result from her personal diasporic experience. Through her work she invites viewers’ internal reflection on one’s values and perspectives while simultaneously “bringing awareness to viewers of their own similarities to the side they position themselves against.” This exhibition incorporates the age-old mediums of sculpture and painting to convey concerns around cultural resilience and perseverance.
Basil Kincaid
Basil Kincaid is an American artist who honors and evolve traditional practices through quilting, collaging, photography, installation, and performance. Kincaid’s materials are vested with emotional and memorial content, and function as spiritual technology, advancing wisdoms born from Kincaid’s greatest values: family, imagination, rest, and experience.
Ronald Young
Exploring sites throughout St. Louis, Ronald Young collects 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 uninhabited buildings that have fallen into disrepair, where they’re often free for the taking. Young elevates bits of disintegrating wooden molding or domestic hardware that has openly weathered into compelling artworks. By doing so, he celebrates the hard-won beauty of these materials while he contends with the disenfranchisements that have decimated once-thriving Black communities.
