1. The Siren and The Sea Lion, 2024
​Amy Callner
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Amy Callner is an internationally-known artist with a homebase in Maryland, at a private studio at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. She grew up in Chicago and found her passion in printmaking during her teenage years. She received her BFA in printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In addition to creating her own art, she also teaches children and adults various drawing and printmaking techniques. Her figure drawing style usually lacks background and context, while her other work is often very imaginative and shaded, as is the case in “The Siren and The Sea Lion.” Callner has expressed a fascination with using ink, which conveys permanence, to things that are fleeting. 

​Callner is the only artist featured in this show who did not previously exhibit her work at Gallery 210. Hers is also the most recently created work of art in the show. Callner and Jeff Sippel collaborated on this print in November 2024 during Callner’s time in St. Louis as a visiting artist. Shortly after, she exhibited her work in a solo show in Baltimore, Maryland titled What I Did In St Louis: A Show Extremely Recent Work by Amy Callner. Amy is the artist of the late Sharon Callner, whose work is featured next to Amy’s in this show. ​

2. Hail Mary, 2005
Sharon Callner

Sharon Callner was born in 1943 and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. She first received her BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University, and then went back to school at the age of 50 to earn her MFA from Northern Illinois University. She taught art at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, but before that, she worked in Chicago as a self-employed studio artist. After Callner’s passing in 2014, a retrospective of her work titled Drawing With Two Hands was exhibited at Gallery 210 the next fall. The show included paintings and drawings that covered a 25 year expanse of the artist’s creativity and talent. The title was a nod to Callner's mastery of the technique of drawing with both hands at the same time. Much of Callner's work is the product of drawing what made her angry and resists the urge to play to "the gaze" and polite sensibilities. 

Callner’s “Hail Mary” is the newest addition to the Gallery 210 Collection. The piece was donated by her husband and UMSL art professor, Phil Robinson, in the days leading up to the opening of this show.

3. The Objects show: A Performance Art Documentation Retrospective, 1988
Rachel Rosenthal

The Objects Show: A Performance Art Documentation Retrospective ran from January 25 to February 19 of 1988, showcasing photographs of Rachel Rosenthal’s Leave Her in Naxos performance (1981). Although the show was a success for Gallery 210, the performance documented in the exhibit was considered controversial during its initial performance in 1981. Leave Her in Naxos was a performance art piece that communicated the theme of splitting and rejoining two halves of a whole using an overtly sexual metaphor. The show reached its climax with Rosenthal’s head being shaved, live in front of her audience, as a gesture of hope and sincerity in letting go of the “dead things” in her life.
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Rachel Rosenthal was born in 1926 in Paris to her Russian parents, with her family later fleeing to New York during World War II. Post-war, Rosenthal studied art, theater, and dance in both Paris and New York, eventually settling in Los Angeles, CA in 1955. As an artist, Rosenthal was most well known for her full-length performance art pieces, which often combined theater, dance, creative slides, and live music. Rosenthal’s work centered around the issue of humanity’s place on the planet and was inspired by her work as an animal rights and women’s rights activist. Her legacy is remembered and honored through the Rachel Rosenthal Company in California, which she founded in 1989.

4. Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, 1989
​Hannah WIlke

Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective was Wilke’s first major retrospective exhibition and showcased a survey of pieces from throughout her career. The show was featured in Gallery 210 from April 3 to 26, 1989. In conjunction with the show, the University of Missouri - St. Louis published the book, Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, featuring a gallery guide and various writings by Wilke herself.

Hannah Wilke was born in New York in 1940 and studied fine art and education at Temple University. Wilke was a painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist, and performance artist and focused her work on themes of language, sexuality, religion, and eroticism. She is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery to arise from the women’s liberation movement. Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987 and documented her final illness in her work “IntraVenus” before her death in 1993. Wilke’s legacy is preserved through the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive in Los Angeles, California through its preservation and exhibition of her work.

5. Belief and Culture: Photographs by Douglas Curran, 1993
​Douglas Curran

Belief and Culture: Photographs by Douglas Curran showcased a collection of photographs by Vancouver-based artist, Douglas Curran. The show itself was displayed in Gallery 210 from September 6 to October 8, 1993 and featured photos of Florida traveling preachers, their families, and followers. The photos within the show explores the way the group’s religious beliefs have inspired their traveling lifestyle and culture, featuring photos from his project, “Moses Couldn’t Draw a Crowd” in the show’s poster.

Born in 1952, Douglas Curran began his career taking publicity stills for various Hollywood film studios. His first major motion picture work was conducted in 1983 on the set of “Draw” featuring Kirk Douglas. Curran’s other work centered around the lives of people and cultures he finds fascinating, with many being largely unknown to the rest of the world. Other projects include his work showcasing the lives of Washington state UFOlogists, and his documentation of the Malawi’s Chewa people, photographing their Nyau practices and rituals.

6. Brodsky & Utkin: Paper Architecture, 1994
​Alexander Savvich Brodsky and Ilya Utkin

Brodsky & Utkin: Paper Architecture was featured in Gallery 210 from April 5 to 30, 1994 and displayed a series of intricately complex drawings of buildings. The artists, Alexander Saavich Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, created these drawings between 1978 and 1993 as imaginative architectural structures that would never be constructed. These drawings were created in response to the state sanctioned architecture being built in Moscow, which resulted in the loss of the majority of Moscow’s historical architectural heritage.

Alexander Saavich Brodsky and Ilya Utkin are architects trained at the Moscow Institute of Architecture in the 1970s. Although not trained in art, both artists used depictions of constructivism, deconstructivism, and postmodernism to make their series a revolt against communist architecture. Building upon architectural ideas from Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Egyptian tomb design, and Le Corbusier’s urban master plans. Although this would be their only artwork created together, both Brodsky and Utkin would continue to work as architects, although Brodsky would also dabble in sculptural work.

7. Ben II, 1999
Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was born in 1933 in Mississippi but lived his entire adult life in Washington, D.C. He was most well-known for his Drape paintings, a style he pioneered that blurred the lines between painting and sculpture by freeing his paintings from the boundaries of canvases and frames. Though Gilliam was relatively politically active in the 1960s (he was arrested numerous times for non-violent civil disobedience) and gained a lot of recognition as a Black artist, he expressed his disinterest in being tokenized as such and usually left the topic of race out of his art. 

In the fall of 2000, Gilliam’s art was displayed in a group show at Gallery 210 entitled Expanding Expressions. It was a travelling show coming out of the Polk Museum in Florida and featured a collaborative screenprinting project between seven internationally-recognized artists and masterprinter Carl Cowden. For the show, Gilliam played with collage elements by cutting apart, layering, and reorganizing different colors, shapes and textures. In his later years, Gilliam focused on the geometric abstractions of his earliest style. Though his art received the most attention prior to the 1980s, his popularity surged again in the mid-2000s, and his art has been on permanent display in the lobby of the National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2016.

8. Untitled, 1999-2000
​Kit Keith

Kit Keith was born in 1963 in Springfield, Illinois but grew up in Sarasota, Florida. Much of Keith’s artistic inspiration stems from aspects of her childhood, including learning how to paint from her father and becoming a trapeze performer in the circus. When Keith turned nineteen, she moved to St. Louis before studying at the Chicago Art Institute for a short time. Afterwards, she bounced back and forth between New York and St. Louis until permanently settling in the midwestern city in 2009. Largely considered a self-taught artist, Keith incorporates collage and found objects into many of her pieces. She is known for her subtle statements on gender, domesticity, and disability using World War II era images, old advertisements, nostalgic iconography, and font types. 

Keith’s work was featured in Gallery 210 in an exhibit titled Some Girls in the fall of 1999. She has since returned to the gallery, appearing in Exposure 10 in 2009 and again in Exposure: 10 Years in 2016. Terry Suhre remembers inviting Keith to the gallery because he felt she wasn’t receiving the local attention that she deserved. Kaith has since made a name for herself in the St. Louis art community. In 2013, she was named “Best Local Artist” by the Riverfront Times. That same year, a documentary about the artist - Comfort and Memory - was screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival. ​

9-10. Sun Flower and Blue In Hand, 2000
James Surls

James Surls ​was born in 1943 in East Texas and spent his childhood in nature, chopping wood and building wooden structures with his dad. Claiming these elements of his early memory as his artistic muse, he also studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and taught at Southern Methodist University and the University of Houston. By the 1980s and 1990s, Surls had become one of the most distinguished artists in Texas and was exhibited in major institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1997, Surls relocated to Colorado, where he continues to produce art in his studio. More recently, he was the 2020 recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

When Terry Suhre approached Surls about exhibiting his art in a show that was titled Embracing Paradox in early 2000, Surls was drawn to the opportunity of producing a catalog alongside the show, which he could send to other galleries for consideration of an exhibition. On the other hand, Suhre’s motivation for bringing Surls to Gallery 210 was to give students exposure to a nationally-acclaimed artist and increase the gallery’s profile. This particular show was co-organized alongside Old Dominion University and Appalachian State and featured prints as well as a few sculptures - Surls’ most popular medium. 

Surls’ art, as represented by the title, Embracing Paradox, evokes messaging about the acceptance of the quandaries of life, and particularly of nature. It not only speaks to personal contemplation but also addresses the complexity and universality of the human experience. Though Surls did not feel he was much of a colorist - in fact, most of his prints in Embracing Paradox were black and white - he played around with the concept of color gradients in his collaborations with Jeff Sippel (“Blue In Hand” and “Sun Flower”), resulting in two extremely colorful pieces. Jeff Sippel remembers Surls thoroughly enjoying the collaboration and said that he could do it everyday if he could, and so it was only logical that he and Sippel create two prints together instead of one. ​

11. Natural Bridge: Karst Cross, 2000
Michael Piazza

Michael Piazza (1956-2006) was a Chicago-based artist whose work often brought attention to the dichotomous experience of histories at a specific site, and much of his work involved advocacy for incarcerated and disabled individuals. Piazza and Terry Suhre were classmates at the University of Illinois, and though they hadn’t stayed in touch, Piazza’s artistic collaboration with youths in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center caught Terry’s attention. In this six-year project, Piazza worked with the youth to use art as a process to have meaningful dialogue about their experiences, discover new ways of expressing themselves, and gain a sense of pride in their work. 

Suhre invited Piazza to St. Louis, where he would embark on a collaboration with UMSL, the Normandy School District and the Central Performing and Visual Arts High School to develop a show titled Natural Bridge Road: An Awareness of Place in the spring of 2000. The show focused on Natural Bridge Road, one of the oldest roads in St. Louis, in its past and present forms. The project showed the importance for a community to have an informed sense of self and to understand the historical, ecological, and various other factors that impact their community. 

12. Cognitive Translation, 2000
Clarence Morgan

Clarence Morgan was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He lived and taught in North Carolina from 1978 to 1992 before becoming a professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, where he remained for thirty years. He now lives in Chicago. Morgan’s art was exhibited at Gallery 210 in the Spring of 1997, in a show titled Recent Abstractions. Though his schedule did not allow for time to collaborate on a print during the running of his show, Morgan came back in 2000 to collaborate on the print, “Cognitive Translation.” 

Already a nationally-recognized artist by the time his art was displayed at Gallery 210, the pieces in Morgan’s show blurred the lines between painting and sculpture, with mixtures of acrylic and gel extending from the canvas. Though an African American artist, Morgan pushed back against the assumption that his race had anything to do with how or why he paints, or that he was motivated by an activist agenda. Instead, his process of painting was quite meditative and used to unbury complex emotions. Though rooted in traditional academic figure painting, throughout his decades-long career, Morgan has gradually shifted his focus to pattern, geometry, and biomorphic abstraction.

13. Proving Field, 2000-01
Michiko Itatani

Michiko Itatani was born in Osaka, Japan in 1948. Before becoming a painter, Itatani started out with a background in literature and philosophy, which continues to influence her work. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, she taught as a professor there until retiring in 2019. Itatani has described her painting as a special language to communicate, to ask questions, and to indulge in the desire to explore the unknown. She structures her work in the abstract space between knowing and not knowing. The hope behind creating a painting is that by looking at and contemplating a piece, the viewer can learn something important to themselves. Thus, her work necessitates the presence of the viewer. 

Terry Suhre invited Itatani to showcase her art in an exhibition titled Radiant Space in late 2000, ten years after working with her for the first time during his employment at the Illinois State Museum. A signature of Itatani’s, which is present in “Proving Field,” is the grid line pattern, suggesting a merging of abstract, mathematical, technological, and cosmic systems of thoughts. ​

14. Phoenix, 2001
​John Dilg

John Dilg was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1945. He was a professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa until retiring in 2017. Throughout his career, his art has been influenced by his childhood in rural Iowa and his training in the Minimalist school of art. Much of his art represents the idea that nature has been misplaced, and thus ‘nature’ is actually ‘unnatural’. His paintings, simple and lacking detail, force the viewer to use their own memory and imagination to make sense of them. 

Dilg’s art was shown at Gallery 210 in a solo exhibit in the winter of 2001, under the title of “Perfect” Memories. In the original catalog for the show, Terry Suhre wrote of the show, “Memories are, of course, not perfect. Past events, places, persons, and things are interpreted through filters of culture, context, and the distance of time. Details are forgotten; other recollections - real or imagined - flow in filling out the linear narrative, editing and conflating different memories into a single event.” Both Terry and Jeff Sippel remember Dilg as one of the most critical artists that they collaborated with in creating a print, but also as one of the most rewarding.

15. Wheel o' Fire, 2001-02
Ron Fondaw

Ron Fondaw was born in 1954 in Paducah, Kentucky. He began painting as a child, earned his BFA in Ceramics from the Memphis College of Art, and then earned his MFA from the University of Illinois in 1979. Fondaw is a local artist, and was a Professor of Art at Washington University in Saint Louis from 1995 to 2020. Fondaw’s work was exhibited in a solo show in the Spring of 2001 at Gallery 210, titled Archeology. The show, consisting of sculptures, was divided into two rooms, with one representing a space for memories and the other representing a space in which memories come from. Memory is a concept that Fondaw explored in much of his work during that time, believing that memory, and making art, are integral to understanding our world and our place in it.

16. Fly Away Home, 2019
​Damon Davis

Damon Davis is a local artist born in 1985. He grew up in East St. Louis and earned his bachelor's degree from Saint Louis University in 2007. In 2014, during the grand jury trial to decide whether officer Darren Wilson would be indicted for fatally shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Davis created one of his most famous works, “All Hands on Deck.” This was a public art installation in which he worked with store owners to wheatpaste photos of hands in the ‘hands up’ gesture (which Brown allegedly used when he was shot) on storefronts that were boarded up in anticipation of unrest. As a multimedia artist, Davis also founded the St. Louis-based art collective, Far-Fetched, and co-directed Whose Streets? (a documentary focusing on the unrest in Ferguson) which premiered in 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival.

In the spring of 2019, Davis exhibited his art in a show titled Negrophilia. The mixed media drawings in the show focused on the invasiveness and obsession with looking at Black people suffering and its psychological effects on both the oppressed and the oppressor. The drawings were also his personal and therapeutic way of dealing with the stress of witnessing this hyperfixation. During the exhibition, Terry Suhre predicted that Davis’ art will continue to grow nationally, with his art already in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African History and Culture and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts and the San Diego Contemporary Museum of Art. He has also won an Emmy Award Mid-America for Best Short Form Program and has received a plethora of other accolades for his film projects.

17. Carcass, 2020
​Ilene Berman

Ilene Berman is a local artist with an artistic practice focused on socially engaged work. She earned her MFA in Sculpture from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Saint Louis University. In addition to teaching, she created Room13Delmar in 2012, which is a mobile arts studio, with the intention to both celebrate the artistry that already exists north of the Delmar Divide (consisting of poorer, mostly African American neighborhoods), while also criticising the lack of creative spaces for residents north of Delmar in the Grand Center Arts District. Berman believes that change happens in gradual, incremental shifts that are often ignited through art.

Berman’s show at Gallery 210, Unnatural State, was slated to run through Spring 2020 but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the gallery had to be closed soon after the artwork was installed. Unnatural State was an extension of Berman’s work with Room13Delmar, as well as her experiences at a three-week residency at a cultural exchange project in Oaxaca, Mexico. The show was a critique of conventional learning spaces and pedagogy. Artwork such as “Carcass”, which showcases normally hard surfaces being reworked into a softer medium, inspires concepts of free and imaginative play and critical agency. ​