Counterpublic is a triennial exhibition reimagining the possibilities of art in public life. Located in St. Louis, Counterpublic connects art with lasting impact by bringing together bold ideas with the region’s most pressing challenges. As one of the largest public art exhibitions in the nation, Counterpublic celebrates and spotlights the St. Louis region as an epicenter of art and culture through new artist commissions, inventive programs, publishing, and civic initiatives.
The third edition of the triennial will take place for a period of three months from September 12 to December 12, 2026. Over the course of the next two years, the ensemble will work closely with leading and emergent artists, architects, collectives, and community organizers to commission new work and continue Counterpublic’s mission to reimagine civic infrastructures with an eye toward generational change. To create an exhibition that reflects a joyous and inclusive vision of St. Louis’ future, the ensemble will explore our shared futures—climate and ecologies, education, generative technologies, Native sovereignty, food systems and more through Counterpublic’s unique model of civic investment and cultural systems building.
Counterpublic 2026 will be curated by St. Louis native Jordan Carter, a curator and co-department head at Dia Art Foundation, where he has curated exhibitions of work by stanley brouwn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, Mary Heilmann, Cameron Rowland, and Lucas Samaras, among others; Raphael Fonseca, a Rio-born curator who serves as the curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum, is deeply interested in transhistorical approaches and how artists explore humor, absurdity, mass culture, and banality; Stefanie Hessler, a curator, writer, and the Director of Swiss Institute in New York, where she invites artists to experimentally reshape the institution through ecological and technological interventions; Nora N. Khan, an independent critic, educator, and curator––most recently the co-curator of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement––whose research focus is critical artistic collaboration with generative technologies; and Wanda Nanibush, a Toronto-based curator and founding director of aabaakwad––an international yearly gathering of Indigenous curators, writers and artists that last took place at Venice Biennale––who recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art.