Kemper Live: Collective Futures
June 14, 2025
2 pm–4 pm
Museum Lobby
2 pm–4 pm
Museum Lobby
Join us for this annual performance event to celebrate the exhibition Seeds: Containers of a World to Come through music, dance, and art-making.
Free and open to the public.
Program
2–4 pm | Planting Microgreens and Art Activity with Seed St. Louis
Jordan Plaza (Kemper south entrance)
Decorate your own container and get your hands dirty planting microgreens to cultivate at home.
2:15–2:30 pm | Juan William Chávez: Imaynatataq Papawan Sumaq Ch’in Chisi (How to Spend a Nice Quiet Evening with a Potato)
Museum Lobby
Featuring experimental sounds from the Peruvian Andes, this 15-minute performance is complemented by video projections celebrating the ancestral significance of the potato, which was originally domesticated by the Indigenous peoples of the Andes approximately 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. The performance’s title draws inspiration from the American botanist and geneticist Edgar Anderson’s essay “How to Spend a Nice Quiet Evening with a Potato,” which was published in the Bulletin of the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1955.
2:45–3 pm | Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón and Tess Angelica Losada-Tindall: Mangle
Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery
Dance artists Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón (MFA 2025) and Tess Angelica Losada-Tindall (MFA 2025) present an embodied exploration of the intersections between the environmental fragility of the Caribbean mangle (mangrove) and the diasporic grief that stems from forced migration. The mangle mirrors diasporic migration through the displacement of its seedlings, which drop from its branches—in a process akin to live birth—only to be swept away by the currents of the waters in which it grows.
3:15–3:30 pm | Juan William Chávez: Imaynatataq Papawan Sumaq Ch’in Chisi (How to Spend a Nice Quiet Evening with a Potato)
Museum Lobby
3:45–4 pm | Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón and Tess Angelica Losada-Tindall: Mangle
Barney A. Ebsworth Gallery
Partners and Performers
Seed St. Louis is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides communities with the tools, education, and empowerment to grow their own food. They support a network of over 250 community gardens, school gardens, and urban orchards in neighborhoods throughout the St. Louis region.
Juan William Chávez is an artist and cultural activist who collaborates on social-practice art projects related to community building, food sovereignty, environmental stewardship, and decolonization. His creative practice includes public art, installations, knowledge-sharing workshops, paintings, zines, beekeeping, and agriculture. He is the director and founder of the art and ecology nonprofit Northside Workshop and a lecturer at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at WashU. He holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chávez lives and works in St. Louis.
Puerto Rican movement artist Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón aims to create artistic explorations that heighten the senses, provoke inquiry, and demand attention, honing their belief that true connection between art maker and audience is achieved through raw emotive experiences. A sense of urgency is common in their work, as art has long been a loud and persuasive means to cope and communicate, facilitating a healing and explorative experience for dancers and audience alike. As a Queer Latine woman, they are committed to making art that is unapologetic, ideally aiding to create a world in which people think longer, feel harder, and experience life without hesitation. A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, they are currently pursuing their MFA at WashU (2025).
Tess Angelica Losada-Tindall is a Cuban American dancer, choreographer, and scholar. Tess is working toward her MFA in dance at WashU (2025) and teaching contemporary partnering and cross-training for dancers at WashU and Webster University. Tess’s research considers bicultural straddling, diasporic grief, liminality, and how identity is shaped by a lifetime of being ni de aquí, ni de allá. Her work is heavily inspired by her father’s stories of his migration from Cuba and the rest of his life spent away in exile between France and the United States. She has performed her work at various festivals, conferences, and events both nationally and internationally, most recently in Buenos Aires. Prior to graduate school, Tess earned a BA in dance performance from Illinois State University and spent the better part of a decade dancing, teaching, and performing in New Orleans.