Counterpublic 2026, “Coyote Time”

“Coyote time” refers to a strategy in video game design, wherein a player might—like Wile E. Coyote—walk off a cliff and, just for a moment, hang suspended in midair. The technique originated as a tactic to prevent rage quitting, allowing the player to jump to safety without suffering the repercussions of a critical misstep. As the title of the third St. Louis triennial Counterpublic, borrowed from artist Alice Bucknell’s commissioned video game installation, it’s a curatorial concept that takes a conjectural turn, evoking a moment of possibility within the unknown, a brief delay between action and consequence.1 The exhibition spans disparate sectors of the city, with newly commissioned and pre-existing works by fifty artists attuning to sites where overlapping crises, from migration and sovereignty to climate collapse and ecological accountability, are most readily felt.

St. Louis shares a particular characteristic common to other Midwestern cities—it seems like it was made for more people than it actually holds. With a population under 300,000, the city feels spread out across a sprawling metropolis, where over the years, residential areas have been torn down and replaced with commercial districts that developers still can’t fill. Racialized spaces are especially subjected to this practice, like the Ville, a historically Black neighborhood in northern St. Louis. Shaped through a century of redlining, disinvestment, and infrastructural issues, the area was heavily impacted by a catastrophic tornado in 2025, which led to the temporary closure of many of its schools. Timmy Simonds’s billowing fabric sculptures installed from flagpoles at several schools across the neighborhood, are inspired by the legacy of Stowe Teachers College, the first Black teacher’s training college west of the Mississippi River. One flag, Sumner Teachers College (STC) at Sumner High (Miss Othmar) (all works 2026), hangs at Sumner High School. Built in 1875 as a dedicated school for Black students, Sumner has remained shuttered since the tornado, and Simonds’s work signals the very real threat of permanent closure. Other artists in the triennial make simple material gestures to recreate spaces for gathering that were destroyed by the tornado, such as Occupy Vacancy’s community garden, planted in the vacant footprint of a razed home (Reflected Memory on Traced Ground); Margaret Honda’s untitled project featuring inviting brick walkway and benches at the Claver House Community Garden; and Sandra Brewster’s adjacent two-person swing, A Place to Put Your Things.

Tony Cokes’s video essay TT The River Won’t Stop (or, A Stomping Horse) pays homage to one of Sumner’s most famous alumni, Tina Turner. Installed on the altar of the Ville’s Antioch Baptist Church, the video plays classic rock songs from Turner’s catalog, while a text-based projection remixes her lyrics with Marxist-feminist readings, creating an open-ended provocation that outlines the racial and gender-based boundaries that have long defined Turner’s life and work. Just south of the Ville, Ali Eyal’s installation The forgotten little candy in my pocket, and. features a sparse domestic setting centered on a cabinet filled with chocolate and empty bullet casings. Eyal relocates childhood memories from Iraq, where he witnessed rapidly shifting geopolitical and personal grounds—from the US invasion to the Iraqi Civil War, as well as his father’s disappearance—using ambiguous narration from a child’s perspective to reconcile fractured recollections and time.

Along the Mississippi Riverfront, artists respond to histories of industry (of goods and people), pollution, and extraction, particularly in the wake of a proposed natural gas pipeline, formerly known as the Mississippi Crossing Project, now rebranded as “Gateway South.” This ecological disruption parallels the cultural and geographical erasure of Native history in St. Louis. On the waterfront, Lingít/Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s Land is never a gateway (Sightline / Lifeline) is an intervention on the famed Gateway Arch. Galanin originally proposed covering the entire arch with a fabricated animal hide, an idea the city vetoed. In response, he created a small installation where, from a specific angle, the hide appears to envelop the so-called “Gateway to the West,” and all the implications of manifest destiny that come with it. The work subtly pushes back against the colonial notion of total erasure, insisting on Indigenous presence for those who know where to look.

At a cross-section between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, the historic waterfront district Chouteau’s Landing, named after the city’s original settlers, hosts works between an elevated railroad and an old steel foundry stuck in a state of semi-gentrification. Anika Todd’s outdoor sound installation Siren Song uses thunderous, reverberating recordings of flowing water to unsettle two decades-old infrastructures—the city’s floodwall and warning alarm system, the latter of which failed during the 2025 tornado. Siren Song, like its namesake, draws us to the water as both a reminder and a portent.

At the National Building Arts Center, formerly the site of a steel company across the Mississippi River in Sauget, Illinois (an industrial village created by the agrochemical Monsanto Company to circumvent Missouri’s environmental regulations), artists further explore the ecological consequences of St. Louis’ rapid industrialization, while pointing toward the potential of land remediation. Chris Carl’s SLAG GARDEN finds new life within this postindustrial environment, using steel-industry byproduct slag to nurture living plants packed in fluorescent sediment socks, with AI-generated voices (a jarring juxtaposition) retelling the history of Sauget, and mechanized sounds appropriated from the surrounding landscape. Carolina Caycedo’s hanging sculpture Fiesta de la Raíces combines steel, rope, beads, wood, and natural materials into an intricate “plant portrait” of a perennial root system. Lynne Smith’s The Unloading Dock (receiving, holding) transforms a retention pond for runoff at the edge of the site into a stabilized ecosystem for wildlife. Like other artworks in the triennial, the projects at the National Building Arts Center examine ruination, subtly refining their focus on constellations of life that endure.

Counterpublic isn’t without its faults. I found myself drawn to objects that were not part of the triennial—murals and makeshift memorials, clothing and food pantries, and other signs of a city caring for itself as it navigates persistent neglect. Counterpublic excels when its commissions respond to the forms of infrastructure the city needs. At the International Institute of St. Louis, a girls’ orphanage turned immigration services center, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s (open kitchen) provides daily lunch throughout the run of the exhibition. The project involved renovating the institute’s kitchen and cafeteria, along with other structural improvements, an example of how public art commissions could be used to build permanent infrastructures that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Returning to Bucknell’s Coyote Time, the video game unfolds as a dreamy fiction set in an all-too-familiar present. A time-traveling delivery driver navigates the streets of St. Louis, simultaneously hovering between multiple periods. In the worst version of this future, geospatial tech companies have wreaked havoc on the environment. But, as the game plays out, it becomes clear this is just one possible future. For Bucknell, the beauty of games is that they allow us to imagine multiple futures with infinite possibilities and permutations. This may feel overly optimistic in the real world, but it invites us to consider that the narrative of an inevitable future (the adoption of AI, climate crisis, and so on) depends on our reduced agency. Coyote Time posits that this speculative future is not set in stone.

The curatorial framework of Counterpublic 2026 would suggest that the works assembled here constitute alternative propositions toward a not-yet future, where we in the present can, for a time, pause to collectively and conscientiously consider our next move. It’s a compelling idea. That all the overlapping crises punctuating our daily lives—political, social, and economic unrest, displacement, genocide, climate catastrophe, war—could suddenly be suspended in time. But the artists in Counterpublic seem ready to deal with these provisional realities head on, offering early warning systems for a future yet to come.