11 Must-See St. Louis Art Exhibitions in 2025

Creativity knows no limit in St. Louis, and this year, the temporary exhibitions at our world-renowned museums promise to leave a lasting impression.

Whether you’re interested in abstract paintings, Pueblo pottery or French automobiles, these must-see St. Louis art exhibitions will inspire a new cultural experience.

Want to dive deeper into the local arts scene? Peruse our guide to museums, galleries, public art, theater, dance and other performing arts.

Shinichi Sawada: Agents of Clay

Until February 9

For more than two decades, Shinichi Sawada – who is based in Japan’s Shiga Prefecture – has produced a veritable army of alluring ceramic figures. Singular, inventive and mesmerizing, the creatures exist somewhere between the natural world and the artist’s imagination, achieving presence and personality far beyond their modest scale. Made in centuries-old Japanese tradition and fired in single-chamber cave kilns, the sculptures have significantly worked surfaces with repeated patterns, horns, teeth, scales, bumps and, oftentimes, multiple faces and eyes. Agents of Clay at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis – Sawada’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. – presents a selection of work created between 2004 and 2021 with support from Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare organization for differently abled individuals.

Narrative Wisdom and African Arts

Until February 16

Narrative Wisdom and African Arts explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. The ticketed Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition acknowledges the intersections between certain historical arts and oral traditions, placing historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa from the 13th to 20th centuries in conversation with contemporary works by African artists around the globe. Pictorial forms are featured prominently; in this way, Narrative Wisdom and African Arts breaks from biases toward formal abstraction in African art. By underscoring the mutability of meanings associated with African narrative arts, the exhibition challenges Western constructs of narrative.

Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art

Until June 30

Illuminating the contemporary intersection of celebrity, commerce, technology and the media, Pop Stars!, the latest exhibition at 21c Museum Hotel St. Louis, features more than 90 works of art by 55 artists from around the world. A must-see St. Louis art exhibition, Pop Stars! is a multimedia exploration of popular culture, where the featured artists examine recent shifts in how culture is being created and consumed, demonstrating the dominance of the popular as today’s ubiquitous culture.

Seeds: Containers of a World to Come

February 21 to July 28

As ecological concerns become increasingly urgent, a new exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum brings into dialogue work by ten contemporary artists whose research-based practices are defined by sustained inquiry into plant-human-land relations. For the artists – who work within diverse geographical and cultural contexts – the seed is the kernel, literally and metaphorically, of their investigations into issues of fragility, preservation and possibility in the face of the global climate crisis. Seeds: Containers of a World to Come features their paintings, sculptures, films and installations, which range from abstract to speculative to documentary. Together, the artworks suggest the seed as a timely means to address existential matters, and the exhibition aims to spark active and imaginative responses through encounters with visually arresting pieces that reframe our understanding of current environmental challenges and reinforce our connection to the natural world.

Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects

March 7 to July 27

In the first survey of Montserrat-born British artist Veronica Ryan, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents more than 100 sculptures, textiles and works on paper, accounting for four decades of her groundbreaking practice. Since the 1980s, Ryan has worked with traditional art materials, including bronze and marble, as well as found everyday items, from seeds to bandages, encouraging viewers to reconsider so-called waste, such as padded envelopes, fabric scraps and plastic bottles. Her reuse of such humble materials suggests environmental concerns around excess and consumption as well as a recognition of the unrealized potential of discarded objects. Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects highlights the artist’s frequent return to past works and ideas in pursuit of new conversations. Through this continuous reshaping, Ryan asks audiences to consider life itself as a process of constant growth, navigation and change.

Like Water

March 7 to August 10

An international and multigenerational group of artists will take over the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis for Like Water, which considers water from different angles – from fonts of inspirations to floods of emotion and the Middle Passage to the Mississippi River. Pouring out their truths and filling the museum with paintings, sculptures, videos and more, each artist approaches the subject of water in deeply individual ways. Through ideas and stories that have been shaped by this life-sustaining element, Like Water encourages viewers to reflect on water’s emotional and poetic resonances as well as the changing cultural, ecological and sociopolitical ecosystems in which we circulate.

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

March 21 to September 14

Made literally from land, Pueblo pottery is one of America’s most enduring art forms, and the innovative exhibition Grounded in Clay connects a remarkable group of Pueblo ceramics to contemporary Indigenous knowledge. Showing at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the exhibition features more than 100 clay works with a range of materials, treatments and forms. Dating from precontact to the present day, vessels and sculptures represent communities spanning from New Mexico’s Río Grande Pueblos to Ysleta del Sur in West Texas to the Hopi tribe of Arizona.

Roaring: Art, Fashion and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939

April 12 to July 27

Interwar France was a period of exceptional creativity, innovation and turbulence, and Roaring explores the role of the automobile as both subject and object during that time, untangling the impact of fashion, architecture, aviation and the avant-garde on French automobile design and production. Bringing more than 100 works of art and design together at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Roaring includes paintings, photographs, prints, posters, furniture, lighting, architectural plans, fashion, textiles and, yes, intact automobiles! Expansive and interdisciplinary, the temporary exhibition illuminates the rich, creative ecosystems that nourished this golden age of French automotive design and influenced modern concepts of mobility, highlighting the bold, untethered visions of figures such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Le Corbusier, André Citroën and Josephine Baker, who embraced the automobile as a provocative expression of the modern age.

In Search of America: Photography and the Road Trip

May 2 to November 2

Intertwined since the very beginning, the camera and the car revolutionized modern life in America. This photography exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum displays artistic work shaped primarily by car travel in the 20th century, exploring how the automobile and the road mediated what the photographers discovered. Themes include Depression-era documentary work, roadside culture, utopian impulses of escape and fascination with the desert Southwest. Significant figures include Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. Vernacular photographs as well as books will also be on view, and the exhibition will include a significant display of work by Emil Otto Hoppé, whose 1926 travels generated the first comprehensive survey of the American landscape.

Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection

September 12 to January 5

For this exhibition, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum spotlights more than 50 works from the Shah Garg Collection, which is committed to amplifying the voices and visions of women artists such as Pacita Abad, Joan Mitchell and Sarah Sze. Making Their Mark – the first public presentation of this important collection – juxtaposes pathbreaking contemporary practices with pioneering historical works to illuminate transgenerational affinities, influences and methodologies among artists from the postwar era to the present day. Featuring artworks that span almost eight decades, the exhibition emphasizes dialogue between artists who circumvent and break through conventions in artmaking, embracing craft techniques, uncommon supports and alternative materials.

Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean

Opening in Fall 2025

This fall, the Saint Louis Art Museum will present a landmark exhibition of the work of Anselm Kiefer, one of the most influential and provocative artists of our time. Featuring works from the 1960s to the present, Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Ocean will be the first comprehensive survey of Kiefer’s work in the U.S. in more than 20 years, and it will occupy approximately 30,000 square feet of gallery space, making it SLAM’s largest single exhibition in decades. Curated by Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the show will encompass a compelling blend of Kiefer’s iconic works alongside new pieces created over the last three decades, including recent paintings of the Mississippi and Rhine rivers, drawing evocative parallels between the symbolic resonance of the two waterways and linking Kiefer’s thematic explorations of time, geography and the eternal flow of human history across the spectrum of the exhibition.

“Since the 1990s, Anselm Kiefer’s work has continued to change while retaining its ability to plumb the most profound depths of human history, from the psychological and visceral to the political,” Min Jung Kim said in a recent press release. “This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to trace Kiefer’s artistic development, from mid-career works to the latest chapter of his continuing evolution.”