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Join us for Kemper Live, where we celebrate current exhibitions Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present and Santiago Sierra: 52 Canvases Exposed to Mexico City's Air with music, performance, and art-making. Inspired by Irving's layered assemblages that explore our relationship to the city street as a site of collective gathering and Sierra's gridded visualization of the accumulated toxicity of environmental conditions, Kemper Live: Assemble asks how performance as public assembly holds the potential for action.

Performances include the Carr Lane Visual & Performing Arts Drum Line and Spirit Squad, new works by Big Muddy Dance Company, poetry readings by Tracy Stanton and Maurice Tracy, and a sound installation by composer and electronic musician Christopher Douthitt.

Enjoy family-friendly art-making inspired by artist Kahlil Robert Irving’s ceramic tiles. Poetry readings contain references to drugs, sex, and violence.

Free and open to the public. 

Learn more about the performers 

The Big Muddy Dance Company is a repertory dance company that showcases high caliber artistic experiences. By engaging both emerging and world-renowned choreographers, collaborating across the St. Louis community through senior outreach, and training future performers through their educational programs, the constantly strive to invigorate life through dance. Follow their work @bigmuddydanceco

The Carr Lane Spirit Squad is the considered the marching ambassadors of the Saintt Louis Public Schools Visual & Performing Arts (VPA) program. Carr Lane VPA Middle School strives to be the best in performance and academically. The sections of the Spirit Squad are the drum line, cheerleaders, flag team, dancers, and drum majors. A year-round activity, the Spirit Squad travels throughout the United States representing Carr Lane and Saint Louis Public Schools in parades, exhibitions, and competitions. Promoting academic achievement, good citizenship, and self-confidence, Spirit Squad members must be dedicated. Carr Lane staff and parents solely sponsor the Spirit Squad.

Christopher Douthitt is a composer from Spokane, Washington. His music draws on the twentieth-century avant-garde, experimental electronics, spoken word, and expeditionary rock. As a scholar, he writes about the perception of space in audio recordings as well as the late career albums of the songwriter Scott Walker. He earned a PhD in music composition from Princeton University, where he studied with Dan Trueman, and an MA in composition from Mills College, where he studied with Roscoe Mitchell and Chris Brown. In 2021 he joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as lecturer in electronic music. Follow his work at christopherdouthitt.com.

Tracy (T-Spirit) Stanton is a poet, community activist, and international spoken word artist. She also serves as the director of movement building and storytelling with the Freedom Community Center, a Black-led organization building a movement of survivors that are intervening in interpersonal and systemic violence while creatively designing systems of safety that do not involve the state. Stanton is also a survivor of many things including the predatory prison industrial complex, St. Louis City streets, racial capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, sexual violence, substance use, trauma, and herself. She deeply understands the need for connection, collective liberation, and creative expression. Poetry has always been a tool for transformation, liberation, and resistance; she is merely carrying on a legacy. T-Spirit the poet has appeared in the St. Louis American, Riverfront Times, St. Louis Magazine, St. Louis Post Dispatch, and on KSDK. She has also been acknowledged in the Washington Post, New York Times, Riverfront Times, St. Louis American, St. Louis Public Radio, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch for her advocacy, activism, and community service. In 2021 she published Some Things Must Be Heard…, and was a 2023 Artist Leadership Fellow with the Mid America Arts Alliance and 2023 Regional Arts Commission Grant Recipient for her Some Things Must Be Heard: Open/ Closed Mic (Spitting & Politicking Series), a project where she features spoken word artists and community organizers. Follow her work @tspirit2019.

Maurice Tracy is a transfemme person, surviving the Midwest and the patriarchal, queer- and transphobic, racist hegemony otherwise known as life in America at this time. They love to cook, write, be in community with friends, and they love, love—it is the only god they know. Maurice has had pieces published in the Huffington Post (when that was cool), the Tenth: a queer zine, the small press By Invitation, and other places. Maurice has read most recently at the Missouri History Museum, in Chicago as part of the Transvengence poetry series, and at Goodie House. Follow their work @blaqueer.

Kemper Live is an ongoing performance series that brings artists across disciplines to connect sound, movement, and visual arts, transforming galleries into a multimedia sound installation.