Since the 1980s, Cokes has developed a visual language all his own, drawing from pop culture sources—including songs, critical theory texts, news reports, and courtroom documents—and remixing fragments of the media landscape to confront issues of structural racism, power, and visibility. Cokes’s tightly choreographed video essays layer found text over monochromatic color fields, often set to dissonant soundtracks that echo the rhythms of advertising even as they subvert them. The result is a propulsive, immersive form that makes reading text feel visceral.
The video installation at CAM is part of Cokes’s multi-sited project for Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time, which includes an installation in the sanctuary of Antioch Baptist Church in The Ville neighborhood and a series of outdoor billboards bridging the two sites.
This newly commissioned work explores the global legacy of Tina Turner, the “Queen of Rock and Roll” whose musical career began in St. Louis, as well as how she is remembered by the community. Created for St. Louis, TT The River Won’t Stop (Edit) reanimates archival material related to Tina Turner, including her time at Sumner High School in The Ville neighborhood, where she lived as a teenager in the 1950s. Built from interviews with members of Antioch Baptist Church’s congregation, public documents, and Cokes’s own memories of growing up with a mother who adored Turner’s music, the piece centers Turner even as it grapples with the appropriation and extraction of Black culture by other communities, and celebrates the resilience of The Ville and neighborhoods like it in the face of structural racism. As it moves between celebration and anger, the work resists a single interpretation.
Cokes’s work transforms CAM’s facade into a public gallery as part of the Museum’s ongoing Street Views series. The video will be projected nightly between dusk and midnight, freely accessible to all passersby.
Tony Cokes is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis as a part of Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time by Stefanie Hessler, Counterpublic 2026 co-curator, with assistance from Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator.
